The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

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.

  • bob_wiley@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    There is an argument to be made that technology, specifically phones, have become so easy to use that there is no requirement for Gen Z to become tech savvy. Even though they grew up around it, their tech is simple and user friendly with all the complicated bits hidden away. When everything seems so easy and doesn’t require much thought, it leaves people wide open to be a target. I can sign up for an Apple Card on my phone and be using it in less than a minute, how will someone differentiate between that at a scam? People who didn’t grow up with this ease still have that thing in the back of their brain saying, “this shouldn’t be this easy,” which can give them some pause and make them check things out… at least that’s what happens to me. I default to not trusting anything.