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...
True. As a kid I'd fall for scams all the time, constantly downloading malware that would crash the family computer.
No way it went up 20x in 5yrs? There must be something weird with the data
Honestly a lot actually has changed in that time.
So much info has leaked that it's a lot easier to phish users than ever. There are dumps of usernames and passwords, so you can know several websites they use as starting points for fraud.
Password reuse and credentials stuffing are also common now, which means if teens reuse passwords you can get into manu of their accounts.
Time online would naturally increase, but more importantly the pandemic would exacerbate that while also increasing the amount of people resorting to scamming.
There's multiple parts to the equation, called confounding variables.
You mean kids don't have enough life experience to spot scams at first glance? No way!
I'm surprised. Just like that time I was the 1,000,000th visitor of this well reputable website back in the day.
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.
They never played Runescape and it shows
One does not simply buying gf
They never heard of Theresa Fidalgo and it shows
Gen Z is also less tech savvy even though they've only known devices and screens since they were born so this isn't surprising.
Even though? I don't think it's a correct assumption that "devices" would or should make you tech savvy. Smartphones and tablets makes you less tech savvy I'd say. Proper desktop OS computers is where it's at.
It doesn't matter if it's smartphone or desktop it's the not quite working part is what got millennials tinkering and understanding technology
Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically "Linux with training wheels." You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn't necessity. It's frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.
I dont think this is the case. I feel like there just is a much wider gap because some people grow up without a computer (they may have one but not see the use of it) and others do. I bet you'd be surprised both at how non-tech-savvy and at how tech-savvy some genZ-ers are.
I have had people asking me for help because their "keyboard was capitalizing everything" (caps lock was on) or being amazed by touch typing. But there are also many people who are (at least somewhat) tech-savvy and it's not so few people either.
What I've heard, and what makes sense, is that Millenials had to learn technology and troubleshoot all the issues for their parents.
Now that they're grown up, they continue to troubleshoot issues for their kids and fix any issues.
So their kids don't get that same experience.
This is more of a generalization of course, there are absolutely genZ-ers who are tech savvy.
I think you raised a good point. A household where one or both parents is heavy into coding or missing would probably help them more than a household that only relies on 'smart' technology. Either of those options would be way more helpful for these skills than growing up without any technology, which is just reality for a lot of people.
I know someone from Gen Z who is horrible with computers. I also know someone from Gen Z who is fantastic with computers.
To be honest, I don't think any generation is immune to this, despite what some want to think.
My personal experience might be biased, but I've also seen a lot of millenials in their early to mid 30s who struggle with almost anything online. Too damn many. I've also seen some people from Gen X who are beyond tech illiterate. We don't really talk about those guys though.
There is still time to fix this problem with the younger Gen Z, but there's almost never any discussion about actually doing that either. "Gen Z" also includes kids who are around 12, but we often act like Gen Z all grew up into adults. Let's get some of that school funding back ffs! Kids have to learn from somewhere, and many of their parents seem to not care about teaching them any of this stuff.
Many of us were lucky enough to grow up when most of this technology was still developing. We HAD to troubleshoot things if we wanted them to work. Fewer things were locked behind "customer service" and crappy warranties. You could physically open things up to fix them without having such a high risk of breaking them in the process.
They've only known devices which were built with such a curated UX that they never tried to troubleshoot problems for themselves. When I was a kid you had to be able to figure out how to edit config files and tweak registry keys to get your PC game to run. These days everything is so smooth and seamless. Oh sure, stuff still breaks. But the computers are pocket sized and run on a locked-down OS, so there's no point trying to troubleshoot them yourself.
The difference now is that in the olden days when something broke you could fix it if you had enough technical know how. For some reason that doubtless involves money that I do not care to learn, companies have invested a staggering amount of R&D into making fixing anything as close to impossible as they can make it unless you are an authorized service technician.
Pop the hood on a modern car, you can change the wiper fluid and that's about it. Apple is proud of their walled garden and parts pairing and is considering charging for the privilege of sideloading apps. Most applications nowadays don't even show crash report data to the user and error messages are getting less and less descriptive for fear of being confusing. The only thing you can really pop the hood on nowadays is webpages, and even then you'll often have to do at least an hour's worth of reverse engineering to get anywhere useful.
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.
And "WiFi" is synonymous for "Interenet connection" to them.
Yea, kiddo, the WiFi is working just fine, but the ISP crapped its pants and you can't connect to anything past this house.
My partner is a millennial who grew up with computers, but never got too technical with them. She was confused when I told her that our WiFi was down at the router, but we still had an internet connection.
"If we have internet, why can't I connect?"
Because the WiFi isn't working.
"But you said we still have an internet connection."
Well, I do, and so would you if you'd let me run an ethernet cable to your office, too!"
"...but if there's no WiFi, why does the cable work?"
Lol
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.
To be fair, cars are becoming less and less serviceable.
I had a light bulb that died on my car, and tried to change it myself. How hard could that be?
Turns out the light bulb is so buried under the engine I ended up giving up and bringing it to the shop. And often even independent shops can no longer service cars, you have to bring it to your maker's dealership because only they have the proprietary tooling to fix it.
As a car enthusiast and backyard mechanic, this is precisely why I prefer to own older vehicles. If something goes wrong with my '06, I can handle that. My friends/family members with newer cars, by and large, can't even handle their own basic maintenance because of the way things are designed now. It's worse than planned obsolescence, it's engineered difficulty.
I tried to replace my sister's serpentine belt a couple summers ago. Simple, basic maintenance, right? Turns out, the only way to turn the tensioner, was from underneath the car. I'm still mad about it.
That feels like it should be illegal.
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
I thank getting into pcgaming for pushing me towards tech literacy. With how simplified tech has gotten and most usage being phones it's not surprising so many are more clueless than boomers who were at least forced to use PCs in an office setting.
that’s similar to what happened to me. i wanted to make a ROM hack for super mario world. fast forward 3 years later and im now using a jailbroken iphone and dual booting win10 and fedora
Same here, people look at me like an alien when I say that I use an android (no root anything) or a jailbroken iPhone. I've met people that don't even understand the concept of a folder...
Getting malware on a chromebook is hard. How did they manage that. I thought it was even more locked down than ios?
i’m honestly not sure. i should probably ask the school IT guy because he had to ban a few people from using chromebooks. we are allowed to download things so that’s probably it though.
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'm not sure that is any different than any other generation. Hell, I doubt you know the age of all the people you're talking about.
If you ask my grandparents the whole US is being destroyed by immigrants despite their day-to-day being the same for decades.
All I gotta do is point out Newsmax and Fox News viewership to counter this stupid Zoomer vs Boomer shit. Just because they are less terminally online doesn't mean they are less gullible.
I have no evidence of who's falling for my 'trolling' online but it's very similar to what you describe. I'll make some absurd, nonsense claim or insult them using flowery nonsense language that can't possibly be taken seriously - but they do!
I suggested that Java devs (programmers) are the reason we'll never have FTL engines. They took me seriously!
Yet there's other times you'll get obviously younger people screaming in comments under videos "FAKE!" because they can't conceive that the video'd thing could happen.
In that instance I can understand it to a degree because they don't have the lived years experience to compare what they're seeing on screen. You'll get them claiming "that would never happen" or "people don't do that and if you think it's real go touch grass" and I'm thinking - "hang on that's happened to me at least 3 times".
I understand it's probably just the arrogance of youth but it's quite shocking at times just how confident they can be of their own ignorance.
I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won't take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can't write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It's all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards "unstructured thought" or perhaps "stream of consciousness" than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.
King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
genX are the perps. shhhh dont tell anyone. no one knows were here
This is also why we are more likely to notice it. Some of us could teach the scanners a thing or two.
Yeah I'd say growing up coding in Basic on DOS machines, and logging onto BBSes gives us a leg up over millenials who at best started with AOL and Windows 98
And people have unirinically said that zoomers don't need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.
Well yeah, there's a lot more of them on the internet.
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.
So... based on this headline... studies from the NFT craze a year and a half ago are finally coming out.
I feel like the scams are just more intracate nowadays.
They're really not. I got one just this morning, your credit has been placed on hold for your AmEx card, log in to update your info... Yeah ok I don't have any credit cards, and besides why is a pet boarding domain sending me AmEx emails? If you can't spot something that obvious then you really don't deserve to have a bank account.
things will be worrying when people Deepfake family members
Why do we have names for generations? Stupid.
Yeah, it's become the new sports teams. Everyone loves blaming their problems on whatever generation they least identify with, when realistically there's no fair way to judge an entire generation and no fair way to compare groups with such large age gaps and wildly different experiences growing up.
Because "the youngest cohort falls for online scams more than the oldest cohort" means the same thing but communicates far less information.
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.
The original article contains 1,313 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I means if we're xou ting things like ordering from wish/temu (which I absolutely would) then yeah I can totally see this.
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.