Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

autotldr Bot , 5 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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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.

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The original article contains 1,313 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

originalucifer , 5 months ago

genX are the perps. shhhh dont tell anyone. no one knows were here

rdyoung , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

This is also why we are more likely to notice it. Some of us could teach the scanners a thing or two.

Asidonhopo , 5 months ago

Yeah I'd say growing up coding in Basic on DOS machines, and logging onto BBSes gives us a leg up over millenials who at best started with AOL and Windows 98

Shady_Shiroe , 5 months ago

I feel like the scams are just more intracate nowadays.

Shdwdrgn , 5 months ago

They're really not. I got one just this morning, your credit has been placed on hold for your AmEx card, log in to update your info... Yeah ok I don't have any credit cards, and besides why is a pet boarding domain sending me AmEx emails? If you can't spot something that obvious then you really don't deserve to have a bank account.

Shady_Shiroe , 5 months ago

Have you seen the scams that spoof your banks phone number so it looks official, only way to check if it is real is to call back.

Shdwdrgn , 5 months ago

Are you referring to actual phone calls? I mean everyone should know by now that phone numbers can be easily spoofed, we see that in every call claiming we need a new credit card or car insurance. The easiest way to see if a call is a scam is to force them to go off-script. Like when they start asking for personal info like your SSN... you called me, why don't YOU know my information? Of course they'll say they need it to verify who I am, and I'll just tell them that they should already know who I am since they called me. Another big tell is if they want more than just the last four of your SSN... absolutely no legitimate agency will ask for the entire thing over the phone.

I guess it just depends on how much free time you have, but sometimes I just like messing with these people to waste their time. Some will get downright angry when they realize you have no intention of falling for their scam, but mostly they just hang up.

redditReallySucks , 5 months ago

Thats a dumb one but I had emails come from the real domain of the company.

Shdwdrgn , 5 months ago

Sounds like a company that shouldn't be trusted if they're getting hacked that easily?

Marin_Rider , 5 months ago

things will be worrying when people Deepfake family members

AngryishHumanoid , 5 months ago

Gen Z are 11 to 26, younger when this study was done. Take out the youngest cohort of Gen Z and the oldest cohort of Boomers, then show me the new statistics. This is how you mislead with data.

Caligvla , 5 months ago

You mean kids don't have enough life experience to spot scams at first glance? No way!

eager_eagle , 5 months ago

I'm surprised. Just like that time I was the 1,000,000th visitor of this well reputable website back in the day.

Nommer , 5 months ago

And people have unirinically said that zoomers don't need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.

givesomefucks , 5 months ago

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.

Teenagers are bad at risk assessment...

This shouldn't shock anyone, but it makes boomers feel good about themselves and their lead addled brains can't handle the critical thinking to understand why this isn't the win they think it's is...

pavnilschanda , 5 months ago

True. As a kid I'd fall for scams all the time, constantly downloading malware that would crash the family computer.

lledrtx , 5 months ago

No way it went up 20x in 5yrs? There must be something weird with the data

givesomefucks , 5 months ago

Time online would naturally increase, but more importantly the pandemic would exacerbate that while also increasing the amount of people resorting to scamming.

There's multiple parts to the equation, called confounding variables.

EmergMemeHologram , 5 months ago

Honestly a lot actually has changed in that time.

So much info has leaked that it's a lot easier to phish users than ever. There are dumps of usernames and passwords, so you can know several websites they use as starting points for fraud.

Password reuse and credentials stuffing are also common now, which means if teens reuse passwords you can get into manu of their accounts.

lamabop , 5 months ago

Millennials are probably the best at avoiding scams.

Unfortunately we also have no money to scam anyway.

Altofaltception , 5 months ago

It's because of all that avocado toast.

AFC1886VCC , 5 months ago

I stopped eating avocado toast and now I own a mansion and 5 supercars.

Altofaltception , 5 months ago

I knew you could do it!

jaybone , 5 months ago

Plot twist: avocado toast is the scam.

MrBusiness , 5 months ago

Mmmmm scam

MentallyExhausted , 5 months ago

More scam, please

yoshisaur , 5 months ago

wish i could say i’m surprised. i’m gen z myself and i’d say i’m pretty decent with not being an idiot with technology. i do the usual stuff like running firefox + uBlockOrigin and i’m also a linux user. anyways, people at my school are just… so dumb with technology. a bunch of people have lost permission to use their school chromebooks and a computer at school because they got malware on it. either by going to a pirate site or just clicking a random download button (my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers). not to mention that most of them believe that macs cannot get malware. so yeah, i’m unfortunately not surprised with this

stardust , 5 months ago

I thank getting into pcgaming for pushing me towards tech literacy. With how simplified tech has gotten and most usage being phones it's not surprising so many are more clueless than boomers who were at least forced to use PCs in an office setting.

yoshisaur , 5 months ago

that’s similar to what happened to me. i wanted to make a ROM hack for super mario world. fast forward 3 years later and im now using a jailbroken iphone and dual booting win10 and fedora

skillissuer , 5 months ago

(my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers)

wtf why

jvrava9 , 5 months ago

Because you can potentially install other extensions, chrome and edge will suck with uBO soon anyway, and you cant install exe's or chocolatey, too restricted.

yoshisaur , 5 months ago

yeah that’s probably it

yoshisaur , 5 months ago

i really wish i knew

jvrava9 , 5 months ago

Same here, people look at me like an alien when I say that I use an android (no root anything) or a jailbroken iPhone. I've met people that don't even understand the concept of a folder...

redditReallySucks , 5 months ago

Getting malware on a chromebook is hard. How did they manage that. I thought it was even more locked down than ios?

yoshisaur , 5 months ago

i’m honestly not sure. i should probably ask the school IT guy because he had to ban a few people from using chromebooks. we are allowed to download things so that’s probably it though.

cmgvd3lw , 5 months ago

Why do we have names for generations? Stupid.

Nachorella , 5 months ago

Yeah, it's become the new sports teams. Everyone loves blaming their problems on whatever generation they least identify with, when realistically there's no fair way to judge an entire generation and no fair way to compare groups with such large age gaps and wildly different experiences growing up.

twack , 5 months ago

Because "the youngest cohort falls for online scams more than the oldest cohort" means the same thing but communicates far less information.

Brekky , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

I means if we're talking about things like ordering from wish/temu (which I absolutely would) then yeah I can totally see this.

the_q , 5 months ago

Gen Z is also less tech savvy even though they've only known devices and screens since they were born so this isn't surprising.

Plopp , 5 months ago

Even though? I don't think it's a correct assumption that "devices" would or should make you tech savvy. Smartphones and tablets makes you less tech savvy I'd say. Proper desktop OS computers is where it's at.

Benaaasaaas , 5 months ago

It doesn't matter if it's smartphone or desktop it's the not quite working part is what got millennials tinkering and understanding technology

rwhitisissle , 5 months ago

Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically "Linux with training wheels." You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn't necessity. It's frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.

DavLemmyHav , 5 months ago

“i use arch btw”

TheBat , 5 months ago

I literally can't tell if this is supposed to be a serious comment or a shitpost copypasta.

rwhitisissle , 5 months ago

Little bit of both.

HopFlop , 5 months ago

I dont think this is the case. I feel like there just is a much wider gap because some people grow up without a computer (they may have one but not see the use of it) and others do. I bet you'd be surprised both at how non-tech-savvy and at how tech-savvy some genZ-ers are.

I have had people asking me for help because their "keyboard was capitalizing everything" (caps lock was on) or being amazed by touch typing.
But there are also many people who are (at least somewhat) tech-savvy and it's not so few people either.

QuadratureSurfer , 5 months ago

What I've heard, and what makes sense, is that Millenials had to learn technology and troubleshoot all the issues for their parents.

Now that they're grown up, they continue to troubleshoot issues for their kids and fix any issues.

So their kids don't get that same experience.

This is more of a generalization of course, there are absolutely genZ-ers who are tech savvy.

Angry_Maple , 5 months ago

I think you raised a good point. A household where one or both parents is heavy into coding or missing would probably help them more than a household that only relies on 'smart' technology. Either of those options would be way more helpful for these skills than growing up without any technology, which is just reality for a lot of people.

I know someone from Gen Z who is horrible with computers. I also know someone from Gen Z who is fantastic with computers.

To be honest, I don't think any generation is immune to this, despite what some want to think.

My personal experience might be biased, but I've also seen a lot of millenials in their early to mid 30s who struggle with almost anything online. Too damn many. I've also seen some people from Gen X who are beyond tech illiterate. We don't really talk about those guys though.

There is still time to fix this problem with the younger Gen Z, but there's almost never any discussion about actually doing that either. "Gen Z" also includes kids who are around 12, but we often act like Gen Z all grew up into adults. Let's get some of that school funding back ffs! Kids have to learn from somewhere, and many of their parents seem to not care about teaching them any of this stuff.

Many of us were lucky enough to grow up when most of this technology was still developing. We HAD to troubleshoot things if we wanted them to work. Fewer things were locked behind "customer service" and crappy warranties. You could physically open things up to fix them without having such a high risk of breaking them in the process.

ShaggySnacks , 5 months ago

I’ve also seen some people from Gen X who are beyond tech illiterate. We don’t really talk about those guys though.

First rule of Gen X is that we don't talk about Gen X.

stoly , 5 months ago

It is the case. The generation that grew up with an iPad never had to learn to use a file system.

HopFlop , 5 months ago

Except gen Z didn't grow up with just an iPad, at least not the majority. A good amount of people had (or have) access to a laptop or family computer. Thats why I say that the gap has just gotten wider. Some people, eg. the ones that just had an iPad and all they ever did was social media and mobile games - sure, they know very little about computers. But the ones that did use computers (and thats not a small amount) do really know how to use it - which is not limited to the more or less office-focused skills of older generations.

bionicjoey , 5 months ago

They've only known devices which were built with such a curated UX that they never tried to troubleshoot problems for themselves. When I was a kid you had to be able to figure out how to edit config files and tweak registry keys to get your PC game to run. These days everything is so smooth and seamless. Oh sure, stuff still breaks. But the computers are pocket sized and run on a locked-down OS, so there's no point trying to troubleshoot them yourself.

AVincentInSpace , 5 months ago

The difference now is that in the olden days when something broke you could fix it if you had enough technical know how. For some reason that doubtless involves money that I do not care to learn, companies have invested a staggering amount of R&D into making fixing anything as close to impossible as they can make it unless you are an authorized service technician.

Pop the hood on a modern car, you can change the wiper fluid and that's about it. Apple is proud of their walled garden and parts pairing and is considering charging for the privilege of sideloading apps. Most applications nowadays don't even show crash report data to the user and error messages are getting less and less descriptive for fear of being confusing. The only thing you can really pop the hood on nowadays is webpages, and even then you'll often have to do at least an hour's worth of reverse engineering to get anywhere useful.

bionicjoey , 5 months ago

That's not the result of advancement, it's the result of obfuscation. It's a deliberate trend among companies to make us powerless to manage our own devices. They absolutely could make them in a way that is simple enough for an end-user to understand if they really wanted to.

AVincentInSpace , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Regardless of what caused it, the fact remains that people stopped learning how to fix their own crap because there's hardly anywhere they can apply those skills.

I'm in a particularly techy subset of gen Z. Every electronic device I own is either jailbroken or running a different operating system than the one it shipped with. I use Linux exclusively which is a fancy way of saying I'm used to having to fix things when they break without any instructions on how to do that. I have trouble with tech meant for normies. They hide so much complexity it makes them impossible to troubleshoot. How can I expect people who were raised on tech meant to be seamlesa to mend the inevitable seams when I don't know how?

It's not their fault, is what I'm saying. I agree that interfaces nowadays are too user friendly.

Rob200 , 5 months ago

I disagree partially with this article. While not every gen z tech consumer is a Linux user. Not all of them fall for scams. It's rather, the people who are so invested in certain franchise like Fortnight, and trying to get free robux or vbucks. Or trying to get free gift cards to get free curency to buy games on console storefronts. There a some that are gen z the do exersize common sense. Being a gen z myself, I would say I am one of those that do exersize common sense guarding form scams.

jerrythegenius , 5 months ago

It made you sound really old when you said "fortnight" and not "fortnite"

Angry_Maple , 5 months ago

Not to mention some of Gen Z is still only around 12 years old.

feedum_sneedson , 5 months ago

They can't use computers! Sorry to generalise, but I was called a genius for using the task manager and just basic Word formatting. The thing is, we do have our 10,000 hours, maybe I am the equivalent of a chess grandmaster in Word. It's just jarring to hear from a university student.

jerrythegenius , 5 months ago

As a gen z, I agree-- I once used a terminal in front of one of my friends and he (unironically) asked if I was programming it myself.

feedum_sneedson , 5 months ago

From what I can see, it's because "screens" got so much easier to use there's been no need for countless nights of screaming at the laptop until you figure something out. I mean, it was not easy becoming fluent.

jerrythegenius , 5 months ago

I mean, there was that one time that I tried alpine linux w/sway and then spent ~30 minutes connecting to my friends wifi (this was when he asked if I was programming it myself).

feedum_sneedson , 5 months ago

Right, Linux printer drivers. I am the only person on the internet that solved the issue, as far as I can tell.

jvrava9 , 5 months ago

I am scared to see what will happen when iPad kids grow up and something doesn't work, their understanding of an app is an icon with a label that you click so it opens. No troubleshooting skills whatsoever, even googling a problem isn't an option for them.

jvrava9 , 5 months ago (edited 5 months ago)

Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking the school or smth when I updated some stuff in termux.

TopRamenBinLaden , 5 months ago

That's wild to me that people consider using an android device to be technical in anyway. It's literally designed to be user friendly enough for grandmas and grandpas to use. iPhones have really rotted some people's brains.

TheBat , 5 months ago

It's them blue message bubbles causing weird things to their brains.

jvrava9 , 5 months ago

Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am somewhat tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking smth when doing an update in Artix...

random_character_a , 5 months ago

I think that generalization is acceptable.

Most avoid computers. My parents use'em and click everything they come across with. Decade ago I installed Linux in their shitty old computer, just so I can remove everything they can use to screw up the OS.

Everything was fine for few years till my father bought a new shitty low end computer from the black friday with all kinds of support and additional warranty BS that needed Windows with VNC that they really didn't understand.

So, the result of that study is BS. One reason is that people selling old people expensive shit they don't need is not considered a scam.

feedum_sneedson , 5 months ago

Boomer mother using Samsung flagship device to use WhatsApp and literally nothing else? That contract is absolutely a scam.

lepinkainen , 5 months ago

80yo grandma with a ultrafast 5G data plan bigger than mine. And her daily phone is a Doro that doesn't even do text messages.

stoly , 5 months ago

Late Gen X to early Millennial was the sweet spot between needing to know how a computer works and having a computer that just works. People before and after don’t have that experience.

HopFlop , 5 months ago

There is a split in gen Z: The ones who didnt use a computer growing up and those that did have one (and also the time to mess around with it). But I feel like you cant group them together.

feedum_sneedson , 5 months ago

That'll be a very pronounced split in Millenials and Gen X as well.

cashews_best_nut , 5 months ago

When I spoke to my younger half-brother a few years back I was stunned to find out he only had an Xbox and phone. No PC. I think he's doing well academically but how the fuck he lived without a proper PC I'll never know.

I think my dad and his mum refused to get him one to protect him cos they didn't let him play GTAV either. It was too violent.

I shudder to think WTF he'll do when AI comes along.

No1 , 5 months ago

I had a work colleague who had a spreadsheet with one column calculating something to do with a particular date. They didn't have any formulas at all. For any calculations. They would go in each day and manually calculate and then type in the values. In every cell.

I put in an input cell date, and simplest of formulas in 3 cells, and they looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.

I returned to my desk, put my head in my hands in sheer shock. I still don't understand what they thought a spreadsheet was for....It made.nice columns?

Anyways, when I recovered, I finished my resignation letter,.and that was the best thing I ever did in that particular cesspool 😁

skeeter_dave , 5 months ago

They never played Runescape and it shows

bionicjoey , 5 months ago

One does not simply buying gf

WolfhoundRO , 5 months ago

They never heard of Theresa Fidalgo and it shows