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...
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.
They can't use computers! Sorry to generalise, but I was called a genius for using the task manager and just basic Word formatting. The thing is, we do have our 10,000 hours, maybe I am the equivalent of a chess grandmaster in Word. It's just jarring to hear from a university student.
From what I can see, it's because "screens" got so much easier to use there's been no need for countless nights of screaming at the laptop until you figure something out. I mean, it was not easy becoming fluent.
Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking the school or smth when I updated some stuff in termux.
Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am somewhat tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking smth when doing an update in Artix...
Most avoid computers. My parents use'em and click everything they come across with. Decade ago I installed Linux in their shitty old computer, just so I can remove everything they can use to screw up the OS.
Everything was fine for few years till my father bought a new shitty low end computer from the black friday with all kinds of support and additional warranty BS that needed Windows with VNC that they really didn't understand.
So, the result of that study is BS. One reason is that people selling old people expensive shit they don't need is not considered a scam.
Late Gen X to early Millennial was the sweet spot between needing to know how a computer works and having a computer that just works. People before and after don’t have that experience.
I had a work colleague who had a spreadsheet with one column calculating something to do with a particular date. They didn't have any formulas at all. For any calculations. They would go in each day and manually calculate and then type in the values. In every cell.
I put in an input cell date, and simplest of formulas in 3 cells, and they looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.
I returned to my desk, put my head in my hands in sheer shock. I still don't understand what they thought a spreadsheet was for....It made.nice columns?
Anyways, when I recovered, I finished my resignation letter,.and that was the best thing I ever did in that particular cesspool 😁
There is a split in gen Z: The ones who didnt use a computer growing up and those that did have one (and also the time to mess around with it). But I feel like you cant group them together.
When I spoke to my younger half-brother a few years back I was stunned to find out he only had an Xbox and phone. No PC. I think he's doing well academically but how the fuck he lived without a proper PC I'll never know.
I think my dad and his mum refused to get him one to protect him cos they didn't let him play GTAV either. It was too violent.
I shudder to think WTF he'll do when AI comes along.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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
Because you can potentially install other extensions, chrome and edge will suck with uBO soon anyway, and you cant install exe's or chocolatey, too restricted.
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...
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.
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
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.
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.
“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.
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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.
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.