Anyone can get scammed online, including the generation of Americans that grew up with the internet.
If you’re part of Generation Z — that is, born sometime between the late 1990s and early 2010s — you or one of your friends may have been the target or victim of an online scam. In fact, according to a recent Deloitte survey, members of Gen Z fall for these scams and get hacked far more frequently than their grandparents do.
Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying. The Deloitte survey shows that Gen Z Americans were three times more likely to get caught up in an online scam than boomers were (16 percent and 5 percent, respectively). Compared to boomers, Gen Z was also twice as likely to have a social media account hacked (17 percent and 8 percent). Fourteen percent of Gen Z-ers surveyed said they’d had their location information misused, more than any other generation. 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.
Correlation does not imply causation.
- People who spend more time online will be exposed to more scams, and therefore are more likely to fall for one. If you don’t see any scams because you don’t know how to open “the internet”, you won’t see scams you can fall for.
- Gen Z could just be more likely to self report. Self-reporting fault or failure is less socially acceptable among the culture of the boomer generation. Entirely possible Boomers are just lying or not self-reporting.
Boomers could also be unaware they were victims of most of these. They think internet scams start and end with nigerian princes
What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better
We were there when they sprouted.
We had pop-up browser window JavaScript viruses that looked real and Nigerian princes, we are just suspicious of everything free.
Looking at you, sexy pole dancing girl that knows my mother’s sister‘s nephew‘s roommate‘s father‘s credit card number.
We don’t have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.
The difference I think is that we grew up with the technology. We saw the democratisation of the internet which makes us generally “smarter” on that front. We also had to fiddle and understand the technology more than Gen Z has to. It’s also probably far easier to scam/get scammed nowadays with crypto bros and influencers being absolutely everywhere.
There is actually a rather legitimate understandable reason why boomers may not self report ; shame and fear their children will no longer trust them to take care of themselves.
Also would like to add this included cyberbullying and that had to inflate the numbers. How many boomers are victims of bullying vs students?
Self-reporting fault or failure is less socially acceptable among the culture of the boomer generation.
Inter-generational criticism is the resort of a bitter and stupid person, no matter the generation in question.
Oh wow thanks so much for the free psychoanalysis. Now do you - what does it say about you that you make ad hominem attacks against people you’ve never met on internet forums and then get downvoted for it?
Somewhat related, but not really: I hear that Gen Z (in general) are worse at tech support issues than the past couple generations. The theory is that Gen Z grew up with tech that, for the most part, “just works”. Troubleshooting issues isn’t as common, and isn’t as necessary of a skill.
especially with mobile phones now, look at iPhone for example, it’s so user friendly that if you try to do anything remotely advance you need to jump through hoops to do it. I had a sales person try to tell me that the iPhone was expandable because it had cloud storage capability, they didn’t know what a Micro SD card was and that it used to be able to go in all the flagship phones. Pretty disappointing
Mostly it’s that everything on phones/tablets/touch screens is an app. You don’t pick where to install it. You don’t need to look up save files.
Some of them are getting to college without ever needing to go through a file directory, so they don’t necessarily even have the basics to troubleshoot.
Same thing happened with cars: boomers used to troubleshoot a lot of car issues themselves, and then somewhere along the line cars got good enough that people stopped learning how to do their own maintenance and now most people don’t even change their own oil.
As technology matures, inevitably users stop worrying about self repair and just hire professionals to do it for them.
Honestly I feel like a dying breed among my middle-class millennial dad-friends.
I’m like the only person who changes their own oil. All the rest of them just drive electric cars.
GenX will forever be the best “jack of all trades” in tech. Someone once said we “straddled the digital divide”, and that will never happen again. At least not until something as radical as the Industrial Revolution or Information Age comes around.
We had to figure shit out. No internet, nothing, make it happen or it don’t work, and you don’t get to play.
Gen Z frustrate the hell out of me sometimes. “Um, my laptop is doing something funny, I need a new one.”
Dear Zoomers:
I love you guys, you have so much heart and clarity of purpose.
But goddamn you guys are slow
Couldn’t this just be a reporting bias? Boomers wouldn’t even realise getting scammed, and if they do, would be too proud to report it.
An anecdote that both supports your perspective and offers an alternative explanation.
My father in law kept falling for the same scam. Something about straightening out his credit card billing for some service he never ordered. But the scammer needed his information to access the online account, but he didn’t have that even set up, so he’d hang up, call his credit card company, and try to complain to them about a problem that didn’t exist.
Another scam about paying balances he didn’t have would result in him mailing checks to his regular credit card company, who would just credit his account to negative balance and it would work out fine.
He’d generally never even recognize it as a scam, even when flat out told by his family or the credit card company.
So his gullible nature was largely cancelled out by not dealing with this online stuff, which is a critical component of how the scams tend to work.
We might have a different bias at play - a boomer able to adjust to new media and do an online Deloitte survey are self selected as being intelligent and have strong critical thinking skills. While i would be hard-pressed to find a zoomer that couldn’t do an online survey.
At the end of the day the selection bias may not apply in a meaningful way as the type of boomer unable to navigate through a simple multiple choice survey would likely not be using the internet in the first place.
For example my dad is 73 and has never used a computer in his life. Worked as a gardener and never needed it for work. He sends letters to his close ones or lets me or my mom do the typing for him. So there’s 0 chance of him getting scammed.
The younger boomers and older gen X would have likely used computers for about 30 years now so would be much more adapted to it as this point. It’s not the year 2000 anymore
Yeah… I feel like somewhere along the way, zoomers didn’t get exposed to something essential, which millennials did get. The real problem is figuring out what that is before too many generations are lacking it.
When millennials were kids, the adults were so fascinated with their aptitude for messing with obscure DOS settings to get their games to run or programming VCRs, that the media did the tech whiz kid trope constantly (e.g. Star Trek, SeaQuest, Hackers, etc, etc). Having to deal with early electronics with arcane interfaces and fickle behavior forced them to have a comprehensive understanding.
The generation that grew up with more point and click experiences did not inspire that same “holy crap, the kids understand this really hard to use technology” and the trope in media died out. They were not forced to understand the workings of the technology to enjoy it.
Similar for cars, people who owned cars in early days pretty much had to understand the nitty gritty, because they’d screw up so often and on the road with little recourse to call for help. Nowadays people largely don’t know how their cars work, because they are more reliable and even if they have a problem on the road, they have a phone in their pocket to get professional help immediately.
I think you overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
I think you’re wrong about the car example. The reason people don’t know how their car works now is because so much of it involves proprietary software that you cannot fix it with physical labor. You have to understand and debug the code as well. Additionally, the manufacturers and dealerships have made accessing the parts (both on the car and replacements) so difficult that there isn’t really a universal approach to fixing the modern passenger vehicle anymore. Millenials didn’t stop fixing cars themselves out of laziness, it was because the knowledge needed to do so was greater than the cost of having a professional do it and have the repair guaranteed.
Meanwhile, though I understand that touch screen and app-based OSes are pretty difficult to program for the average consumer, it’s not the only option for computing, just a popular one. This also has nothing to do with whether what you’re downloading is safe.
Young men are always more likely to fall for investment scams
Gambling in general is something a lot of young men seem to be falling for. I suspect they always have. “I won £400 last week!”, ignoring the 12 weeks previous where they lost £100 a time. For my father’s generation it was horses, for mine it was the football, now it’s crypto.
Every generation gotta make its own mistakes, I guess.
Boomers wouldn’t admit to falling to a scam
