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.
I think you overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
Yeah exactly, I was one of only about three kids in my school year who knew how to do anything on a computer, there were some snes and megadrive owners but mostly just people didn’t even know tech existed.
The reason we weren’t getting scammed is our only contact with the outside world was a landline which we had to fight for time on even without the internet.
By the end of the 90s computer use was fairly common and people were falling for the dumbest shit, ‘if you don’t send this to five friends before midnight you’ll die’ and ‘just give me all your rare armour and I’ll double it and give it back’ The only reason we weren’t getting scammed for real money is that before PayPal the only people who could accept money online were multinational companies and banks - who all have much more elegant ways of scamming.
We were just as gullible as any other generation.
