Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do : technology

[-] knittedmushroom@beehaw.org 132 points 9 months ago

Hm, like most opinion pieces, there aren't any hard numbers from studies really shown besides the initial percentages. And I immediately picked up on the second paragraph's

Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.

Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you're lumping cyberbullying into the mix! They're one of the first generations that have had to deal with their peers harassing the everloving shit out of them all hours of the day online. As a millennial, I didn't have to even think about putting up with that until at least high school. I'd really want to see what questionnaire wording they were using for the survey data. If the question was legitimately "Have you ever been a victim of phishing, identity theft, romance scams, or cyberbullying?" then I think almost everyone with a social media account for their whole life would need to check "yes."

[-] NattyNatty2x4@beehaw.org 28 points 9 months ago

Self reporting is also notoriously unreliable

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[-] Reil@beehaw.org 19 points 9 months ago

Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix!

They're high in each of those categories individually, not (just) if you add the categories together and compare the totals. Millennials are slightly higher in Romance scams and identify theft though.

BUT these numbers are also self-disclosed. I'm not sure how you'd correct for this in a survey, but I could easily believe that these two generations are simply more likely to realize they've been victimized, and have a higher exposure to the internet (and thus to scams).

I'd be more interested in something like a sit-down test, to be honest. It'd be easier to account for time spent online and self-awareness of victimization, and more likely to isolate "internet street smarts", as far as I can tell.

[-] ArtZuron@beehaw.org 10 points 9 months ago

Considering what the boomers and Gen x have put the millennials through, I'm not surprised they're susceptible to romance scams.

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[-] ConsciousCode@beehaw.org 7 points 9 months ago

Also worth considering with self-report that Gen Z may just be more open about their failings

[-] Blake@feddit.uk 86 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Stupid article, most of Gen Z aren’t even 21 yet, of course they’re gonna fall for scams, they’re teenagers or younger lol. I got scammed loads of times on RuneScape as a kid, and that taught me better than anything else how to avoid scams.

[-] nightdice@feddit.de 40 points 9 months ago

Considering that Gen Z is usually defined as being born between the mid-late 1990s and early 2010s, I wouldn't support the first half of that statement. Everyone born in the first half of 2005 or earlier are 18, making them adults, so about half of Gen Z is adults.

Now whether this article uses that age range properly or whether it's just someone using the term to mean "young people", I have no idea.

But the premise of the article that just because someone uses technology all day makes them somehow invulnerable to scams (something that has absolutely nothing to do with how much someone uses tech) was ludicrous from the start.

[-] Kichae@kbin.social 46 points 9 months ago

just someone using the term to mean “young people”

Rude. How dare they stop using "Millennial" to mean "young people". They weren't supposed to recognize that some of us are in our 40s now!

[-] Blake@feddit.uk 29 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Millennials: we’re all adults now, we want to be taken seriously!

Time: passes

Millennials: never mind we’ve made a mistake let’s go back

[-] Kichae@kbin.social 13 points 9 months ago

Accurate. I'd like to go home now.

[-] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago

We still aren't though.

[-] Krauerking@lemy.lol 3 points 9 months ago

Oh sure but they don't call us young anymore and it hurts our souls to see our life failing to do anything before us.

[-] TwilightVulpine@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago

That and our backs too.

[-] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 3 points 9 months ago

I'd like to be but I can't seem to make enough money to afford adult stuff

[-] HubertManne@kbin.social 3 points 9 months ago

my millennial niece having a kid is the thing that most made me feel old.

[-] Blake@feddit.uk 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The US census used 1997 - 2013 as the range. Which gives us an age range of 10-26, making the median age 18 - and I was thinking of 21 as adult, rather than 18 - which is why I said “they’re teenagers or younger” - but yes, you’re right, “only” 40%-ish of gen Z are under 18 :p

Run the same survey again in 11 years and compare 21+ gen Z to 2023’s boomers and I bet the results aren’t even close.

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[-] Unsustainable@lemmy.today 7 points 9 months ago

I got scammed by Columbia House when I was a teenager.

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[-] astraeus@programming.dev 3 points 9 months ago

Buying gf

[-] mal099@kbin.social 33 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The headline is pretty misleading. Reading the headline, I was imagining Nigerian Prince scams. But in the article, they state "Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying."
Teens get bullied more than the elderly? Say it ain't so!
While GenZ is, according to their source, also the generation with the highest percentage of victims if phishing scams, it's actually millenials that fall for identity theft and romance scams the most.

The article also states that 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."
The source for Social Catfish's claim is data released in 2023 by the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. According to that data, in 2022, there were 15,782 complaints for internet crime by victims under 20 totaling $210.5 million in losses. In the same year, there were 88,262 complaints by victims over 60, totaling $3.1 billion in losses.

Every generation since the beginning of times has claimed that the following generation was rude, stupid, and stopped doing things the "right way" like we used to do in the good old days. It has always been bullshit, it will always be bullshit. Stop stressing, the kids are alright.

[-] tburkhol@beehaw.org 9 points 9 months ago

Who are these kids under 20 with $14,000 to give out to scammers? Retirees with a spare $35k, I believe, but I'd really like to see the distribution for both. I'm guessing the means and medians are very different.

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[-] koper@feddit.nl 31 points 9 months ago

"Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology."

[-] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 29 points 9 months ago

That's part of it for sure, but anecdotally I also find that Gen Z people often have quite a shallow, even naive understanding of the technology they use every day. Probably due to modern interaction design valuing simplicity above everything else.

[-] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 18 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Or because they’re probably 15 years younger than you are and are learning just like we all did. God imagine if crypto was a thing when we first got internet connections.

[-] PonyOfWar@pawb.social 12 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

My point is that when we learned to interact with technology like computers, we had to start at a much lower level, that naturally gave us a deeper understanding of the technology because it was required to use it. I learned the MSDOS command line when I was 6 years old, not because I wanted to learn about the technology, but because I wanted to play games on the computer. It just happened to give me a basic understanding about how a computer's file system works.

These days you don't have to worry about any of that, as technology is for the most part effortless to use and doesn't require any understanding below the surface. So naturally Gen Z people won't pick up the knowledge Millenials did, not because they're dumber, but because they don't have to.

[-] BolexForSoup@kbin.social 9 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It’s not that I don’t think this argument is compelling, I just think ultimately it’s a theory without any sources behind it and it’s up against a lot of equally compelling, competing theories. There are so many things to consider here. For instance: access to technology has rapidly expanded. When you and I were going on the Internet in 2003, we only did it with PCs and for limited windows every day. Many of us shared a family computer, for instance. So we had fewer vectors or opportunities to be scammed.

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[-] mojo@lemm.ee 30 points 9 months ago

Click this link for discord nitro free!

[-] melmi@lemmy.blahaj.zone 11 points 9 months ago

I'm so used to seeing damned bots spamming that everywhere, my half asleep ass immediately reached for the report button lol. It's just instinct now. Pavlov's Discord Nitro.

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[-] petrescatraian@libranet.de 21 points 9 months ago

@admin this is a result of the enshittification of technology. You're no longer forced to learn, you're only displayed a button that you need to press. Doesn't matter what will the button do behind, just blindly trust that it does what it says it does.

[-] admiralteal@kbin.social 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

That is not what enshitification means.

Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.

It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It's about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.

We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.

[-] Crotaro@beehaw.org 13 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I have to say that learning how to pick out the actual download button from all the other "download" buttons is one of the most crucial steps in making yourself resistant to online scams.

Really, yeah, people today use computers on more than an hourly basis. But that doesn't automatically make someone more technologically literate. It's no longer a hard requirement to understand how a computer (I'm lumping smartphones, PCs, Macs, etc.) works in order to do useful operations with it.

[-] Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org 6 points 9 months ago

Install our software! Just pipe a curl download of some random script into a root shell, it’ll be fine.

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[-] chloyster@beehaw.org 5 points 9 months ago

This seems needlessly gatekeepy to me. Are you saying everyone using technology needs to learn exactly how it all works? People aren't allowed to just use the tools provided to them? Like are cameras worse now that you can just point and shoot vs having to go through many steps for the photo to maybe turn out ok?

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[-] agent_flounder@lemmy.one 5 points 9 months ago

That's not enshittification it is a normal progression of tech to make it useful for a wider audience. Otherwise we would be typing a byte at a time with front panel toggle switches like on a PDP-8.

[-] Binthinkin@kbin.social 20 points 9 months ago

And Windows is a huge red flag for this. Literally two OS’s working at the same time make it a shit product. One OS for legacy users who know what cmd and control panel are and the new junk system where they want to circumvent the first OS and slither all of your information to their shit tier One Drive. One Drive is iCloud without security.

Absolutely garbage and cannot wait to feel confident in a dual boot or just straight Linux because this is just stupid tech making people helpless and hamstringing them as per usual.

[-] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 16 points 9 months ago

What are you talking about? How does an OS relate to the scams described in the article?

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[-] Vlyn@lemmy.zip 7 points 9 months ago

You're comparing apples and oranges. Windows is the OS, One Drive is just a sync service (like Dropbox). They are not comparable in the least.

Or did you want to talk about Office365 or something?

[-] skullgiver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl 5 points 9 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]

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[-] blindbunny@lemmy.ml 12 points 9 months ago

I worked in fraud until it broke my soul. Yeah I believe it. The amount of young adults that fall for Facebook scams especially is pretty staggering.

[-] toothpicks@beehaw.org 7 points 9 months ago

I've no idea what's going on in this entire thread

[-] acastcandream@beehaw.org 9 points 9 months ago

A bunch of my millennial peers acting like their boomer parents with "kids these days" and "back in my dad we had common sense!" takes despite promising themselves for decades they'd have at least a tiny bit more humility than the aforementioned overly judgmental parents.

[-] unionagainstdhmo@aussie.zone 7 points 9 months ago

Before I got rid of Instagram, I would see lots of my friends accounts promoting some crypto thing. They say they got "hacked" but they just weren't thinking

[-] autotldr@lemmings.world 5 points 9 months ago

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles:

Click here to see the summary

“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.

Saved 83% of original text.

[-] sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 4 points 9 months ago

Crypto moment

[-] NightGaunts@kbin.social 4 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I am a gen-x boomer and was doing cyber bullying for a while, mostly targeting gen z. This article certainly catches the spirit of my work Maybe one day they will finally add a button that will prevent these 'online' scams, until then, be wary/where.

[-] Kit@lemmy.blahaj.zone 19 points 9 months ago

Why were you cyber bullying gen z kids?

[-] MrBusiness@lemmy.zip 5 points 9 months ago

I'm just picturing that South Park episode with Kyle's dad trolling.

[-] Rhaedas@kbin.social 7 points 9 months ago

gen-x boomer

As a Gen-X I have to ask what exactly is meant by that. That you openly admit cyber bullying gives some hint, but I'd rather get a self definition than to assume.

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[-] Gaywallet@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

Surveys are really interesting in that, they often find things that are quite strange, and you are left wondering who was included and who wasn't. For example, I found it kind of surprising that gen z and millennials are way more often to 'touch grass' than the older generations

but it may make sense in the context of who actually got polled - I know I wouldn't bother to fill out an online poll or one that I received in the mail without compensation, and I suspect a decent amount of disconnected individuals would feel similarly. It was an online survey, so it's not too surprising that they caught people who are connected to the internet, but its kind of surprising they found people who are rarely online.

[-] admin@beehaw.org 3 points 9 months ago

This is a very insightful and informed take. TBH, I did NOT do my due diligence of critical thinking before posting this article. I've succumbed to knee jerk reactions once again.

Technology