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.

  • reversebananimals@lemmy.world
    22711·
    9 months ago

    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.
    • Taleya@aussie.zone
      114·
      9 months ago

      Boomers could also be unaware they were victims of most of these. They think internet scams start and end with nigerian princes

    • heird@lemmy.ml
      331·
      9 months ago

      What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better

      • BudgetBandit@sh.itjust.works
        23·
        9 months ago

        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.

      • surewhynotlem@lemmy.world
        257·
        9 months ago

        We don’t have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.

      • BestBouclettes@jlai.lu
        3·
        9 months ago

        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.

    • asteriskeverything@lemmy.world
      181·
      9 months ago

      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?

    • Tedesche@lemmy.worldEnglish
      427·
      9 months ago

      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.