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.
Considering what the boomers and Gen x have put the millennials through, I’m not surprised they’re susceptible to romance scams.
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.
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!
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
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.
Oof. Brings back the memories.
Though it was expensive, my Time Life 80s Music series (CD) was worth it and I still have em all. Thankfully, it wasn’t hard to cancel once I realized I was getting redundant stuff and they would never stop sending CDs as long as I kept paying.
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.
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.
Got a point there, but it’s what the sources say. One possibility might be that it’s the teenagers that got scammed (or even just filing the complaint?), but their parents’ accounts that got emptied. This part of the report is unfortunately really lacking in detailed descriptions of the data.
“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.
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.
I mean part of it is as well a lot of the computer shit I was taught in school just isn’t fucking taught in a lot of school districts anymore even though many jobs these days will have you at least needing to know how to type at a computer
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