Stupid article, most of Gen Z aren’t even adult 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.
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.
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!
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.
Then read the article because it literally tells you the answer in like the second paragraph lol
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.
You cannot determine median based on range alone. You basically need to know how your datapoints (people in this case) are distributed to be able to actually calculate the median, because the 50th percentile does not have to lie smack in the middle between the extreme ends of your range.
Sure you can, it’s just the median of the range rather than the median person. For what it’s worth, I did look at age distribution statistics and there is some disparity but it’s minimal, which is why I wrote 40% instead of 44%.
Anyways, this is getting much too pedantic, obviously I’m not writing a scientific analysis, it’s just an internet comment, it doesn’t need to be perfect.
I got scammed by Columbia House when I was a teenager.
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.”
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.
Also worth considering with self-report that Gen Z may just be more open about their failings
Considering what the boomers and Gen x have put the millennials through, I’m not surprised they’re susceptible to romance scams.
We just want to be loved.
Self reporting is also notoriously unreliable
“Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology.”
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.
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.
@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.
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?
Install our software! Just pipe a curl download of some random script into a root shell, it’ll be fine.
@Bitrot scams no longer mean malware anymore. Phishing is also a thing for example. And hiding full URLs from a browser’s bar doesn’t help with this either
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“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.
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 damages.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.
I’ve no idea what’s going on in this entire thread
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.
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
Click this link for discord nitro free!
😮 Where’s the link? I don’t use Discord but I like free /s
Anything is free if you just grab it and walk away!
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.
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.
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What are you talking about? How does an OS relate to the scams described in the article?
It sounds like they are saying that the operating system is dumbing down for its users, meaning users could be less intelligent and still use it.
@[email protected] and I believe two OS’s refer to MacOS and Windows, in regards to how they are protecting users privacy. Furthermore I think your point on the Steam Deck is in line with that commenter is postulating; that people have been getting more stupid and less able to navigate the technology they own. I think in this commenters perfect world, the Steam Deck wouldn’t have needed to have been locked down in that way.
At least, this was my takeaway from their comments. I’m not them so I can’t say for sure of course.
I’m somewhere in the middle of both of you, though more with you. In terms of usability, Windows just works. For as much as I’d like to prefer Linux, I think it’s absurd that I’d have to know the entirety of the ins and outs of the OS in order to use it at a basic level, which is probably rooted in growing up with GUI’d programs. I’m fine with CLI, I just get frustrated because projects I’ve tried using it for rarely work all the way through the guide. Basically, it feels like if you try to find any guide on Linux and any guide on Windows, the likelihood of (me) someone being able to complete that guide all the way through will likely side on Windows, due to the insanely diverse nature of Linux it feels like there’s a higher chance of things going wrong due to the number of steps. By having the ability to do anything and everything, you then actually have to do everything. Also, permissions and networking are just a pain…
Personally I think that’s just as crazy as having no control at all, so I’m never going to win lol.
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.
