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.

  • frozencat@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Im a middle gen z id say i defiently notice this modern tech isnt built for the average its built for the dumbest. For example I had to spend 10 minutes teaching my friend how to unzip a file also a lot of gen z dont have computers and just use thier phones for everything

    • LordXenu@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I deal with a lot of kids fresh out of college. The surprising part is how many don’t know what Windows File Explorer even is, much less file manipulation. Everything is saved to the desktop.

      • bob_wiley@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I don’t think this is new. This is why the iPhone didn’t have Finder on it for a looooooong time (now Files in iOS and still dumbed down). Jobs talked about how the last area of complexity to solve for was the filesystem, because a lot of people didn’t get it. That’s probably what led to Spotlight on macOS. This is probably why the first versions of iCloud locked files to app-specific folders and it was basically useless for general file storage.

        I always found it interesting that his solution to people not understanding the filesystem was to effectively get rid of the filesystem (from the user’s point of view), but when it came to people not knowing how to use keyboard, he said death would take care of it.

      • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Oh yeah. When you ask people to check their downloads folder, and they open up chrome “because that’s where my downloads are”. FML.