Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
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.
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.
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Could this be a case of gen z having a larger online presence than boomers? Kind of like how people from Florida are more likely to be attacked by sharks than someone from Kansas?
Edit: I somehow missed this on the first pass.
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
Gen Z spends more than twice the amount of time on social media than boomers, and most scams are done on social media, but older people are usually easier and more lucrative targets, so it's hard to say.
Even beyond that, we're talking a group that has become a monetary target only in the last few years VS groups that have been larger targets for 20 to 30 years. A percentage of people in older generations have either learned from past experience or have had their "keys" taken away in a way young adults fundamentally can't have.