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.

    • bradorsomething@ttrpg.network
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      9 months ago

      Remember building a computer and being excited it turned on the first time, so you could decode the error beeps to see what it components didn’t work?

    • Hurts@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Can you reword your comment to remove the word “retarded” please? Otherwise, I have to remove it as the admins have made it clear that this word is not welcome here due to its bigoted, hateful, and potentially offensive nature, and the use of the word as an insult is discouraged.

        • Hurts@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          If enforcing instance-wide rules is an issue for you, I have bad news about any forums you choose to join in the future.

          Not only is it against instance rules, but the comment was reported multiple times for being hateful and offensive, if it doesn’t personally offend you that is wonderful, it doesn’t change the bigoted nature of the word, and that it does offend some people.

          • systemglitch@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Felt like Reddit to me, including the 24 hour ban. You can say what you want, but in the context of its use it was nothing special. All I see are people drooling to be offended by something that was not offensive, and then a mod stepped in, spouted mod nonsense and issued a ban.

            I would not even be surprised if it now results in further bans, because the writing is on the wall.

            Not to mention how many subs you mod. You are exactly what comes from Reddit and it will only continue to get worse, exactly like it was on Reddit, because power mods only move in one direction… forcing more control. Censoring more speech. Banning expressed thoughts that don’t conform to the hive mind.

            I’ve seen you a thousand times. You are no different.