Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.
The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.::undefined
The cost of falling for those scams may also be surging for younger people: Social Catfish’s 2023 report on online scams found that online scam victims under 20 years old lost an estimated $8.2 million in 2017. In 2022, they lost $210 million.
Teenagers are bad at risk assessment...
This shouldn't shock anyone, but it makes boomers feel good about themselves and their lead addled brains can't handle the critical thinking to understand why this isn't the win they think it's is...
Gen Z are 11 to 26, younger when this study was done. Take out the youngest cohort of Gen Z and the oldest cohort of Boomers, then show me the new statistics. This is how you mislead with data.
Boomers fall for online scams because they aren't aware of how powerful the internet can make bad actors.
Zoomers fall for online scams because they're younger and simply inexperienced dealing with scam artists.
Millennials fall for online scams because we're lonely and really want the friendly Indian guy we're talking to to get their itunes gift card.
Exposure to technology does not automatically breed expertise. I have a 15 year old. Smart phones have existed for her entire life. She knows how to use Snapchat and take goofy selfies. That's where her expertise ends. Any time anything is wrong, she sounds like her grandma complaining "mY mOdEm DoEsNt WoRk!" It's not a modem grandma! That's your computer! Most of her friends are the same way.
When you grow up around something being easy to use, you lose the intricate understanding that used to be necessary.
For Gen X and Millennials, it's probably cars and/or electronics.
Busted light switch cover? Better call an electrician "just in case".
Need to replace an air filter? Better take it to the shop.
Not sure where the line is, but I had a Gen X woman tell me that she needs to take the car to the dealership to get her air pressure adjusted. When I showed her how to take off the cap on the tire's air pressure valve, she looked at me as if I had just pried off her steering wheel, lol
Not sure where the line is drawn, and there are definitely some people in those generations who know those things. But I'd bet Boomers and earlier generations had a better understanding on average.
They are also falling for right wing trolls wrapped thinly in progressive language
wish i could say i’m surprised. i’m gen z myself and i’d say i’m pretty decent with not being an idiot with technology. i do the usual stuff like running firefox + uBlockOrigin and i’m also a linux user. anyways, people at my school are just… so dumb with technology. a bunch of people have lost permission to use their school chromebooks and a computer at school because they got malware on it. either by going to a pirate site or just clicking a random download button (my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers). not to mention that most of them believe that macs cannot get malware. so yeah, i’m unfortunately not surprised with this
King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
If there's one thing I've noticed about Gen Z purely from interacting with them online it's that they're incredibly, remarkably gullible. Like, broadly resistant to the concept of facetiousness, sarcasm, or that they might be being taken for a ride. They take everything at face value. I once made the joke on reddit that the greatest Disney villain of all time was Cobra Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch because his backstory was that he used to work for the CIA before becoming a social worker, which meant there was a non-zero percent chance he helped train Osama Bin Laden in insurgency tactics in the 1980s and was therefore indirectly responsible for 9/11. The zoomers were both confused and outraged because they believed me entirely at face value. I would imagine them applying a similar degree of online literacy to your average dark pattern scam that said "click here for free V Bucks." There are no V Bucks, dog. There's never any V Bucks.
I think they're way more used to just giving information away without thinking about it. "They have everything already, why fight it" just plays into the hands of scammers.
Well yeah, there's a lot more of them on the internet.
So... based on this headline... studies from the NFT craze a year and a half ago are finally coming out.
And people have unirinically said that zoomers don't need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“People that are digital natives for the most part, they’re aware of these things,” says Scott Debb, an associate professor of psychology at Norfolk State University who has studied the cybersecurity habits of younger Americans.
In one 2020 study published in the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, Debb and a team of researchers compared the self-reported online safety behaviors of millennials and Gen Z, the two “digitally native” generations.
But because Gen Z relies on technology more often, on more devices, and in more aspects of their lives, there might just be more opportunities for them to encounter a bogus email or unreliable shop, says Tanneasha Gordon, a principal at Deloitte who leads the company’s data & digital trust business.
Staying safer online could involve switching browsers, enabling different settings in the apps you use, or changing how you store passwords, she noted.
Gordon floated the idea of major social media platforms sending out test phishing emails — the kind that you might get from your employer, as a tool to check your own vulnerabilities — which lead users who fall for the trap toward some educational resources.
But really, Guru says, the key to getting Gen Z better prepared for a world full of online scams might be found in helping younger people understand the systems that incentivize them to exist in the first place.
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So, why? Why is the generation that arguably knows more about being online than any other (for now) so vulnerable to online scams and hacks? There are a few theories that seem to come up again and again. First, Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology.
If they didn't control for the relative rate of use of technology across generations, I can't see this study being worth talking about.
But these are sophisticated scams where the scammer sounds exactly like Uncle John and he wants you to help him out with some chips and a Costco gift card for Amazon. That's pretty normal because your uncle doesn't like going to the mall.
It's not like the boomers sending all their money because a prince is going to invest it in recovery his kingdumb or something like that and then pay it back tenfold.
I means if we're talking about things like ordering from wish/temu (which I absolutely would) then yeah I can totally see this.