The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.
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.
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).
Does this control for the fact that Gen Z are simply online a lot more than Boomers?
I can’t tell what these are percentages of. 16% of scammed people were GenZ? 16% of GenZ have experienced a scam? Because both of those would be skewed if, for example,
100% of GenZ use the internet daily and 20% of Boomers have never used it.
Once again, a journalist doesn’t know how to present statistics in a meaningful way. They do this 72%!
I think it has more to do with age and experience than generational labels. Kis who “were just born yesterday” or “are still wet behind the ears” have always been, and always will be gullible. Everyone needs to be fooled a few times before they “wise up”. We need to stop all generational finger pointing and bigotry.
Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.
And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.
One thing about this particular phenomenon that the article doesn’t take into account is that Gen Z is a lot more online than boomers are, hence they are exposed more often to the various dangers.
Which means, depending on what exact years you’re going with, the youngest gen z are roughly 13 years old, possibly younger, and roughly half of them are minors, I think it’s fair to call those parts of the demographic children in a lot of contexts. Most of them aren’t old enough to drink, only a handful of them are old enough to rent a car from most companies. Most of them are still in school, still living at home with their parents (not that I’m throwing shade, I was still living at home at their age, my wife didn’t finally graduate until she was in her 30s, that’s just kind of the way things are these days for a lot of people)
Teenagers and younger 20-somethings are capable of a lot of things, but they have little to no firsthand experience with the real world. They know enough to get themselves into trouble, but not enough to avoid trouble or get themselves out of it. That’s just part of growing up.
I know plenty of people the same age as me who fell for various kinds of scams in their teens and 20s, a lot of craigslist scams, MLMs, various phishing emails, sending money to random online “friends” only to have them disappear afterwards, every week someone’s Facebook was getting hacked, etc. And while we grew up with the internet, a lot of the potential avenues for scams hadn’t really fully matured yet, so it was easier to sort through the noise. There wasn’t a whole lot of user-generated content and many websites didn’t need any kind of account to use, so after you learned not to click the flashing banner ads saying you won something and ignore weird emails, you were mostly pretty safe, and we adapted to all the new stuff as it came around and mostly learned how to sort out the good from the bad.
If we’d been thrown headfirst into the internet of today, I’m sure we would have fallen for just as many if not more scams.
There’s probably also a lot more research now into who is falling for what kinds of scams and how frequently. If you got scammed in 2003, there’s a good chance not too much came of it, maybe you had to close some bank or credit card accounts that got compromised, but cops often wouldn’t really know what to do about it, you couldn’t really post about it anywhere unless you had your own blog, Myspace was just getting started, Facebook wasn’t out yet, maybe your 12 friends on xanga would read about it. And unless some survey taker at the mall or at your college or something asked you about it, there probably wasn’t too many good ways for researchers to gather data about your experience from you.
Nowadays everyone has their own little soapbox, there’s a lot of ways for people doing research on this sort of thing to find you and reach out, and overall it’s a lot better understood.
Xennial here: Come back and talk to me after spending a good chunk of your childhood editing config.sys and autoexec.bat, loading drivers and freeing up conventional memory.
Great grandparents. Millenials are their parents, Gen X are their grandparents, Baby Boomers are their Great grandparents. If you’re too stupid to get the generations right you’re probably too stupid to get the rest of the facts of the “journalism” right.
(It was kind of expected at the time that the Millennials would be named Generation Y because they followed us, but that name never took hold. So they skipped Y and went straight on to Z, then continued with A.)
This right here. More poignantly perhaps since the Boomers (not everyone in that age group, obviously) ruined Gen X lives first, before they destroyed the futures of subsequent generations, so we’ve been watching this dumpster fire for decades and warning about how bad it could become.
What might be unique to X-ers is that we witnessed the social fabric in the U.S. falling apart in the 80’s under Reagan–when the likelihood of a blue-collar worker having a solid career at a good company for life, supporting a family on one income, and being able to retire without living in poverty went from being a common thing to more of a lost dream.
So yes, to be lumped in with the same generation that pulled the rug out from under us is adding insult to injury.
I was interested in computers since like I am 6 so I am not one of those type of GenZ teenagers that only know how to use social media platforms like Instagram. Not all GenZ are like them.
Yeah. But ngl, my family is pretty big and between my 6 cousins, I am the only one that tries to understand computer and how things work. They just use internet for gaming and social media, don’t even care to see why their wifi is slow and just blame the ISP. Fixing is my only utility to my family, but I’ll take it.
Maybe it’s just a wisdom kind of thing? Gen Z is still young and learning the ropes of adult life. Boomers have more years on them to learn what is or isn’t a scam.
… but, but, but all the zoomers in here like to act like they are savvy when it comes to scams and they always seem to think they know better than everyone else.
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Does this control for the fact that Gen Z are simply online a lot more than Boomers?
I can’t tell what these are percentages of. 16% of scammed people were GenZ? 16% of GenZ have experienced a scam? Because both of those would be skewed if, for example, 100% of GenZ use the internet daily and 20% of Boomers have never used it.
Once again, a journalist doesn’t know how to present statistics in a meaningful way. They do this 72%!
I think it has more to do with age and experience than generational labels. Kis who “were just born yesterday” or “are still wet behind the ears” have always been, and always will be gullible. Everyone needs to be fooled a few times before they “wise up”. We need to stop all generational finger pointing and bigotry.
Amen. I remember in high school and my early 20, I was gullible af.
It’s an age issue. Not a generational one.
It’s a terribly written article.
Its awfulness is at least 81%
But is that 81% decrease in quality statistically significant?
This is actually quite funny. The most connected generation ever. Lol
deleted by creator
new article in 10 years: Is gen alpha ruining the scam industry???
It’s always the toast.
Skepticism is good. However, there is a lot of evidence that Gen Z is quite tech illiterate in general, but especially compared to the Millennial cohort. Colleges and universities have had to force Gen Z students into basically remedial computing courses just to teach them how file systems work and other simple-yet-taken-for-granted concepts work. Drop rates for CS degrees are climbing as Gen Z moves into higher education and hits a very difficult wall for them.
And, in the end, that last bit was definitely another scam targeting their relative ignorance in the space. That is why so many “influencers”/scam artists target/targeted them with “career guides” or code boot camps or whatever. And I think that disillusionment is also part of the backlash against devs in general as “tech bros” despite very few devs actually working in the Valley for those companies under those conditions.
One thing about this particular phenomenon that the article doesn’t take into account is that Gen Z is a lot more online than boomers are, hence they are exposed more often to the various dangers.
Breaking news: children are more gullible than adults.
“children”.
“Researchers and popular media use the mid-to-late 1990s as starting birth years and the early 2010s as ending birth years”
(source wikithingy)
Which means, depending on what exact years you’re going with, the youngest gen z are roughly 13 years old, possibly younger, and roughly half of them are minors, I think it’s fair to call those parts of the demographic children in a lot of contexts. Most of them aren’t old enough to drink, only a handful of them are old enough to rent a car from most companies. Most of them are still in school, still living at home with their parents (not that I’m throwing shade, I was still living at home at their age, my wife didn’t finally graduate until she was in her 30s, that’s just kind of the way things are these days for a lot of people)
Teenagers and younger 20-somethings are capable of a lot of things, but they have little to no firsthand experience with the real world. They know enough to get themselves into trouble, but not enough to avoid trouble or get themselves out of it. That’s just part of growing up.
I know plenty of people the same age as me who fell for various kinds of scams in their teens and 20s, a lot of craigslist scams, MLMs, various phishing emails, sending money to random online “friends” only to have them disappear afterwards, every week someone’s Facebook was getting hacked, etc. And while we grew up with the internet, a lot of the potential avenues for scams hadn’t really fully matured yet, so it was easier to sort through the noise. There wasn’t a whole lot of user-generated content and many websites didn’t need any kind of account to use, so after you learned not to click the flashing banner ads saying you won something and ignore weird emails, you were mostly pretty safe, and we adapted to all the new stuff as it came around and mostly learned how to sort out the good from the bad.
If we’d been thrown headfirst into the internet of today, I’m sure we would have fallen for just as many if not more scams.
There’s probably also a lot more research now into who is falling for what kinds of scams and how frequently. If you got scammed in 2003, there’s a good chance not too much came of it, maybe you had to close some bank or credit card accounts that got compromised, but cops often wouldn’t really know what to do about it, you couldn’t really post about it anywhere unless you had your own blog, Myspace was just getting started, Facebook wasn’t out yet, maybe your 12 friends on xanga would read about it. And unless some survey taker at the mall or at your college or something asked you about it, there probably wasn’t too many good ways for researchers to gather data about your experience from you.
Nowadays everyone has their own little soapbox, there’s a lot of ways for people doing research on this sort of thing to find you and reach out, and overall it’s a lot better understood.
Ah yes, its time to release TaylorSwiftAlbum.exe and FamousKpopBand.bat
removed by mod
Xennial here: Come back and talk to me after spending a good chunk of your childhood editing config.sys and autoexec.bat, loading drivers and freeing up conventional memory.
Great grandparents. Millenials are their parents, Gen X are their grandparents, Baby Boomers are their Great grandparents. If you’re too stupid to get the generations right you’re probably too stupid to get the rest of the facts of the “journalism” right.
Generation X forgotten once again. Whatever.
(It was kind of expected at the time that the Millennials would be named Generation Y because they followed us, but that name never took hold. So they skipped Y and went straight on to Z, then continued with A.)
It wouldn’t be so bad but when they do remember us it’s to lump us in with our parents
This right here. More poignantly perhaps since the Boomers (not everyone in that age group, obviously) ruined Gen X lives first, before they destroyed the futures of subsequent generations, so we’ve been watching this dumpster fire for decades and warning about how bad it could become.
What might be unique to X-ers is that we witnessed the social fabric in the U.S. falling apart in the 80’s under Reagan–when the likelihood of a blue-collar worker having a solid career at a good company for life, supporting a family on one income, and being able to retire without living in poverty went from being a common thing to more of a lost dream.
So yes, to be lumped in with the same generation that pulled the rug out from under us is adding insult to injury.
FREE ROBUX
I was interested in computers since like I am 6 so I am not one of those type of GenZ teenagers that only know how to use social media platforms like Instagram. Not all GenZ are like them.
Yeah. But ngl, my family is pretty big and between my 6 cousins, I am the only one that tries to understand computer and how things work. They just use internet for gaming and social media, don’t even care to see why their wifi is slow and just blame the ISP. Fixing is my only utility to my family, but I’ll take it.
Maybe it’s just a wisdom kind of thing? Gen Z is still young and learning the ropes of adult life. Boomers have more years on them to learn what is or isn’t a scam.
You are hereby banished from the internet for even mildly defending boomers!
… but, but, but all the zoomers in here like to act like they are savvy when it comes to scams and they always seem to think they know better than everyone else.
Zoomers on Lemmy probably know better.
I think you give them too much credit.