Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do - eviltoast

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.

      • Tedesche@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Generalizations are, by definition, inaccurate. I don’t know if that’s what you mean by “bad,” but if it is, that’s not my opinion, it’s just what the word means.

        • NightAuthor@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          The context for this convo seems missing, not sure what happened…. Anyway, this is generally what I’d say about generalizations:

          Well, some people seem to be of the mind that generalizations are always bad, as in morally wrong.

          And generalizations, based on evidence, are a recognition of a pattern. Depending on the generalization, it can be potentially very useful.

          Like brightly colored animals aren’t safe to eat. That’s a good (more accurate than not) and useful generalization.

          It depends on the amount and quality of evidence used in the creation of the generalization, and probably the intelligence of the generalizer.

          Though I don’t recall the point I was trying to Make.