- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
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.
Sadly, I had to pull my Gen Z sister aside to explain to her phishing when she lost her Steam account, poor girl was crying and trying to raise the funds to get her account back…
She was very happy when she got her account back, I celebrated by giving her a few games and some information on how to avoid it happening again. Thankfully there was no VAC-Ban added by the thieves.
Seriously I thought they were teaching about this thing in schools
Was it a ransom?
It was someone pretending to be a valve employee who had shut the account down for suspicious activity and said that restoring it would cost $200. In reality the account was still active it was just spamming people with the same scam
damn
Yeah, never pay these creeps, just contact REAL staff and explain what happened