If someone had told me that Gen Z falls for online scams three times as often as boomers do, I'd have simply replied, "Okay, boomer." But it turns out it's true.
Look at this:
Seriously, I can't believe this. Like, boomers get a pass on the scam thing, you know, because technology is tough for old people and it's easy to scam someone who's unfamiliar with the internet. There's a meme for it!
But Gen Z, well, they grew up on the internet, so they don't really have an excuse here.
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.
So apparently it's really easy to trick Gen Z kids. I'll have to keep that in mind next time I'm running low on funds. Speaking of funds, it's not just the number of times these kids are getting scammed that stands out here; the cost is pretty high as well.
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.
That is quite the jump right there. $8.2 mil up to $210 mil in just five years!!!
One thing we have to admit is that Gen Z is on the internet way more often than the rest of us, which probably leads to more scamming opportunities. They are also falling hard for a lot of these romance scams, which is a product of Gen Z being more comfortable with online dating than the older generations. These romance scams often include blackmail (you can put two and two together), which could be the reason the price of these scams has risen so drastically.
Either way, somebody's gotta help these Gen Z kids out. When you're doing worse on the internet than your grandparents are, you've got a serious problem.
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