Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do
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.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Boomers could also be unaware they were victims of most of these. They think internet scams start and end with nigerian princes
What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better
We're the ones doing the scamming
Roblox shareholders: *collective nod*
Child labor has never been easier!
We were there when they sprouted.
We had pop-up browser window JavaScript viruses that looked real and Nigerian princes, we are just suspicious of everything free.
Looking at you, sexy pole dancing girl that knows my mother’s sister‘s nephew‘s roommate‘s father‘s credit card number.
We don't have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.
A significant portion of them is in their 20s now.
Brains finish developing around 25. But that's not really the point. Many of them are young and that will move the results of the group enough.
Years go fast my man, gen z can be up to 26 years old
Millennials sure lost a shit ton of money to crypto scams over the past 6 years.
The difference I think is that we grew up with the technology. We saw the democratisation of the internet which makes us generally "smarter" on that front. We also had to fiddle and understand the technology more than Gen Z has to. It's also probably far easier to scam/get scammed nowadays with crypto bros and influencers being absolutely everywhere.
There is actually a rather legitimate understandable reason why boomers may not self report ; shame and fear their children will no longer trust them to take care of themselves.
Also would like to add this included cyberbullying and that had to inflate the numbers. How many boomers are victims of bullying vs students?
That's what the article is saying as well (but nobody reads those)
Inter-generational criticism is the resort of a bitter and stupid person, no matter the generation in question.
Oh wow thanks so much for the free psychoanalysis. Now do you - what does it say about you that you make ad hominem attacks against people you've never met on internet forums and then get downvoted for it?
That I speak my mind and have unpopular opinions. I'm not ashamed of it.
You should be.
Somewhat related, but not really: I hear that Gen Z (in general) are worse at tech support issues than the past couple generations. The theory is that Gen Z grew up with tech that, for the most part, "just works". Troubleshooting issues isn't as common, and isn't as necessary of a skill.
especially with mobile phones now, look at iPhone for example, it's so user friendly that if you try to do anything remotely advance you need to jump through hoops to do it. I had a sales person try to tell me that the iPhone was expandable because it had cloud storage capability, they didn't know what a Micro SD card was and that it used to be able to go in all the flagship phones. Pretty disappointing
The iphone has always sacrificed user freedom to provide a streamlined experience a monkey could make work.
Mostly it's that everything on phones/tablets/touch screens is an app. You don't pick where to install it. You don't need to look up save files.
Some of them are getting to college without ever needing to go through a file directory, so they don't necessarily even have the basics to troubleshoot.
Same thing happened with cars: boomers used to troubleshoot a lot of car issues themselves, and then somewhere along the line cars got good enough that people stopped learning how to do their own maintenance and now most people don’t even change their own oil.
As technology matures, inevitably users stop worrying about self repair and just hire professionals to do it for them.
Honestly I feel like a dying breed among my middle-class millennial dad-friends.
I’m like the only person who changes their own oil. All the rest of them just drive electric cars.
To be fair that sounds like a good thing
GenX will forever be the best "jack of all trades" in tech. Someone once said we "straddled the digital divide", and that will never happen again. At least not until something as radical as the Industrial Revolution or Information Age comes around.
We had to figure shit out. No internet, nothing, make it happen or it don't work, and you don't get to play.
Gen Z frustrate the hell out of me sometimes. "Um, my laptop is doing something funny, I need a new one."
Dear Zoomers:
I love you guys, you have so much heart and clarity of purpose.
But goddamn you guys are slow
Couldn't this just be a reporting bias? Boomers wouldn't even realise getting scammed, and if they do, would be too proud to report it.
An anecdote that both supports your perspective and offers an alternative explanation.
My father in law kept falling for the same scam. Something about straightening out his credit card billing for some service he never ordered. But the scammer needed his information to access the online account, but he didn't have that even set up, so he'd hang up, call his credit card company, and try to complain to them about a problem that didn't exist.
Another scam about paying balances he didn't have would result in him mailing checks to his regular credit card company, who would just credit his account to negative balance and it would work out fine.
He'd generally never even recognize it as a scam, even when flat out told by his family or the credit card company.
So his gullible nature was largely cancelled out by not dealing with this online stuff, which is a critical component of how the scams tend to work.
When the low int character keeps rolling critical success on skill checks.
We might have a different bias at play - a boomer able to adjust to new media and do an online Deloitte survey are self selected as being intelligent and have strong critical thinking skills. While i would be hard-pressed to find a zoomer that couldn’t do an online survey.
At the end of the day the selection bias may not apply in a meaningful way as the type of boomer unable to navigate through a simple multiple choice survey would likely not be using the internet in the first place.
For example my dad is 73 and has never used a computer in his life. Worked as a gardener and never needed it for work. He sends letters to his close ones or lets me or my mom do the typing for him. So there's 0 chance of him getting scammed.
The younger boomers and older gen X would have likely used computers for about 30 years now so would be much more adapted to it as this point. It's not the year 2000 anymore
Yeah... I feel like somewhere along the way, zoomers didn't get exposed to something essential, which millennials did get. The real problem is figuring out what that is before too many generations are lacking it.
When millennials were kids, the adults were so fascinated with their aptitude for messing with obscure DOS settings to get their games to run or programming VCRs, that the media did the tech whiz kid trope constantly (e.g. Star Trek, SeaQuest, Hackers, etc, etc). Having to deal with early electronics with arcane interfaces and fickle behavior forced them to have a comprehensive understanding.
The generation that grew up with more point and click experiences did not inspire that same "holy crap, the kids understand this really hard to use technology" and the trope in media died out. They were not forced to understand the workings of the technology to enjoy it.
Similar for cars, people who owned cars in early days pretty much had to understand the nitty gritty, because they'd screw up so often and on the road with little recourse to call for help. Nowadays people largely don't know how their cars work, because they are more reliable and even if they have a problem on the road, they have a phone in their pocket to get professional help immediately.
I think you overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
Yeah exactly, I was one of only about three kids in my school year who knew how to do anything on a computer, there were some snes and megadrive owners but mostly just people didn't even know tech existed.
The reason we weren't getting scammed is our only contact with the outside world was a landline which we had to fight for time on even without the internet.
By the end of the 90s computer use was fairly common and people were falling for the dumbest shit, 'if you don't send this to five friends before midnight you'll die' and 'just give me all your rare armour and I'll double it and give it back' The only reason we weren't getting scammed for real money is that before PayPal the only people who could accept money online were multinational companies and banks - who all have much more elegant ways of scamming.
We were just as gullible as any other generation.
I think they may have been referring to back when cars were a new technology, like in the first half of the 20th century
I think you're wrong about the car example. The reason people don't know how their car works now is because so much of it involves proprietary software that you cannot fix it with physical labor. You have to understand and debug the code as well. Additionally, the manufacturers and dealerships have made accessing the parts (both on the car and replacements) so difficult that there isn't really a universal approach to fixing the modern passenger vehicle anymore. Millenials didn't stop fixing cars themselves out of laziness, it was because the knowledge needed to do so was greater than the cost of having a professional do it and have the repair guaranteed.
Meanwhile, though I understand that touch screen and app-based OSes are pretty difficult to program for the average consumer, it's not the only option for computing, just a popular one. This also has nothing to do with whether what you're downloading is safe.
Never had to debug a car I didn't modify (and I've been modifying them for 40 years now).
Yea, when we add-on fuel injection or bigger turbos we alter the ECU. But daily drivers just don't need debugging. Their failures are still mechanical systems (or sensors, which the computer then just uses defaults).
Automotive computers are some of the most rigorously tested tech out there. Even my 1974 Bendix analog fuel injection system has never "failed". Components have, which then puts the system in fail-safe mode, like all automotive computers.
All the automation BS is another matter, which is why I refuse to own a car with that garbage. Like Tesla (or Mercedes and now upper-end of many brands). It's simply not tested sufficiently, and I'm guessing it's just not regulated like the "traditional" systems are.
Young men are always more likely to fall for investment scams
the magic internet money was a scam sure, but collectible jpegs will surely be my ticket to easy stre- shit.
Gambling in general is something a lot of young men seem to be falling for. I suspect they always have. "I won £400 last week!", ignoring the 12 weeks previous where they lost £100 a time. For my father's generation it was horses, for mine it was the football, now it's crypto.
Every generation gotta make its own mistakes, I guess.
Boomers wouldn't admit to falling to a scam
GenZ still trends fairly young. The difference is that the stakes are much lower. Millennial kids got scammed in RuneScape, GenZ kids get scammed in Minecraft or whatever. When you are youung you fall for dumb shit and that helps you learn and grow so that you don't hand over your pin number to someone claiming to be from the bank when you are age 75.
Gen Z spans 1997-2012. The oldest Zoomers are 26 years old. But I agree that the phrase is used colloquially to mean kids much younger than that.
Minecraft was released in 2011, when the oldest Zoomers were 14 years old, and the youngest hadn't been born yet. Seems like a good game to associate with that generation.
The other difference is that the measurement is "scammed ONLINE". Boomer generation will have fewer numbers overall that are heavy participants on the Internet, which I think would increase the chances of running into an online scam.
My mom barely even knows how to use a smartphone. So she's not likely to be involved online long enough to interact with something that would scam her. However if she DID run into a scam, I'm pretty sure my mom would 100% fall for it.
Gen X got scammed by that damned hustler at the Street Fighter cabinet.
Damn him, he knew the input to select Akuma! That's no fair!
NFTs? Worked with a few young people who thought they could make money flipping those.
From the outside it seems to me that NFTs were mostly bought by millennials with disposable income for the first time in their 30s.
Fake Bad Bunny tickets got the only zoomer I know, she was out $200, but that's not a great sanple size.
Sometimes this "dumb shit" that they fall for isn't dumb shit that just teaches you a lesson, but rather quite predatory, such thinking you are getting blackmailed to share photos of yourself.
The biggest scam of my generation was PVP in the wilderness. They made it sound like it was going to be cool but all it ended up being was fascist gangs farming for GP. It was only once the Venezuelans (read: communists) unionized and kicked the gangs out did they remove PVP.
Not really surprising considering how much more time gen z spends on the internet. And how many members haven't even graduated high school yet.
I think people forget that the internet has fully supplanted television and unlike the 90's home that had a TV that was somehow always on (or at least that's how it was at my Aunts house in the 90s), people these days while away their hours fully plugged into the internet. I would suspect people who watched a lot of television were more likely to fall for scams on TV, too (my Aunt, for example, believes literally everything on FOX News). Internet scams are far more of a free-for-all than television ever was.
Also how many gen z have grown up with amazing technology but don’t really understand it at all. It just works.
Not like previous generations that had to learn more in depth to make shit work because it was buggy as hell or just plain wasn’t user friendly at all.
According to the dates provided the youngest zoomers are just now joining 8th grade. How useful is that data really?
They're also susceptible to getting their phone stolen, people accessing their computer they left open in class and a whole lot of threat vectors boomers and millenials aren't susceptible to (or not anymore)
From the generation before this, I always thought the "mobile generation"'s computer savviness had been overrated. Mobile phones (especially iOS) are like a walled garden compared to using a PC and Windows. It was easy to shoot yourself in the foot on Windows 98, etc so you learnt to be careful very quickly. Likewise, there's no jumping into the registry or terminal, no built in zip/rar handling, warnings from the OS, built in Malware protection, etc
The internet was a wild place in the 90s and this generation never really experienced that. Forums had lax moderation and could be full of troll links to "I am an idiot", goatse, etc. Files could be hosted on random webpages and the downloads could contain anything: often a virus alongside the actual file, etc
I remember not using an antivirus as Norton and co would crush your machine, so you just had to tread extremely carefully
Entirely true. Gen Z is not "tech smart."
While we're on the topic of shit boomers and zoomers fall for:
STOP
RAWDOGGING
RANDOM
HYPERLINKS
On another topic, go to this link to get free Apple Gift card point.
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So this is a genuine question. When doing research online you have to click on random websites/links. How do you protect yourself from that?
Use Firefox and run uBock Origin, Noscript, and Privacy Badger extensions. If something seems suspicious, google the url and see if people are talking about it.
i can't use firefox and i had to turn off noscript forgot why though.... i use/do everything else, so i guess i'm kind of safe.
No script is not an easy tool. By default, it breaks 99% of websites. It has become a game for me though to approve the lowest amount of scripts to make a site run, but I realize this is definitely not for everyone.
Check the url. Not what the link displays as, right click or hover that shit and see what the real url is.
Don't follow links to sus.minemycrypto.sudan
Not even to win an internet argument.
As an older member of the cohort I've noticed a certain gap. Those of us who grew up when computers were just becoming a thing for everybody (sorry gen X I know you were first but they were expensive luxuries rather than ubiquitous) had to learn to fix shit all the time and got to learn about the dangers more or less as they came into being, computers still weren't entierly user friendly and learning was encouraged by the fact that it didn't take much knowhow to do things like play an entire game by just downloading the free trial over and over and moving your save file.
Past a certain line however (I think the 2000s to 2010s kids) computers became much more of a black box and companies like apple were making 'it just works' user interfaces that required very little fixing but also gave you very little control if you didn't already know where to look. So we got that disconect of a group that are very comfortable with computers but don't understand much about how they work and get bombarded with all the dangers of the internet at once rather than having had the chance to learn them as they came about.
Im a middle gen z id say i defiently notice this modern tech isnt built for the average its built for the dumbest. For example I had to spend 10 minutes teaching my friend how to unzip a file also a lot of gen z dont have computers and just use thier phones for everything
I deal with a lot of kids fresh out of college. The surprising part is how many don’t know what Windows File Explorer even is, much less file manipulation. Everything is saved to the desktop.
What's funny is that the generation(s) that get computers understand things like the file explorer, the desktop, etc. But, they're mostly too old to get the metaphors those are based on.
I especially think the "Desktop" metaphor is interesting. Because until laptops became common, people's computers rested on desks. The main use for a desk in a business setting was a surface for your computer keyboard and monitor. But, the "Desktop" metaphor referenced a previous world where desktop computers didn't exist, and the main point of a desktop surface was for writing and organizing papers.
So, there's this tiny overlap in time where the metaphor made sense.
Like, from the 1700s to 1980s if you took a businessman and said "imagine you're sitting at a desk in an office, what are things you'd find on that desk?" They'd talk about things like, pens, pencils, folders, documents, maybe a desktop calendar. But, you take a businessman from 1995 onwards and ask the same question they'd say things like a computer monitor, keyboard, mouse, printer, etc. The computer desktop is basically a time capsule of the time before desktops had computer equipment on them. All the metaphors are paper and paper-related things, which are no longer in much use because they've been replaced by a computer.
Oh yeah. When you ask people to check their downloads folder, and they open up chrome "because that's where my downloads are". FML.
I'm just glad that when I'm old, my knowledge of computers will be seem to be confounding wizardy to the generations behind me.
Granddad what’s an ISA?
You'll learn about it when you are older.
Nobody needs to know about ISA now and good riddance.
I'm a Gen Z working in the Comp Sci field. Most people my age know how to work technology but don't know how technology works.
Knowing what buttons to tap in an app to get it to do what you want is one thing. However, it's a different pool of knowledge to understand what's going on when those buttons get tapped.
Familiarity with tech is high, and I think that gives many in my generation a false sense of security.
Fair point, and thank you for your perspective. It's funny for me-- I'm a Millennial from the early 90s working in Comp Sci as well, and growing up I was very worried that the next generation would be flooded with tech-knowledgeable people and I would struggle to stand out.
For better or for worse, my experience lines up very much with what you've described -- folks who are extremely adept users, but not understanding what's happening behind the scenes.
Could this be a case of gen z having a larger online presence than boomers? Kind of like how people from Florida are more likely to be attacked by sharks than someone from Kansas?
Edit: I somehow missed this on the first pass.
The amount of older people having an online presence is ever increasing. And I hope the percentages mean "% of the generation members with an online presence".
whats the importance of that distinction when the entirety of gen z is online.
Gen Z spends more than twice the amount of time on social media than boomers, and most scams are done on social media, but older people are usually easier and more lucrative targets, so it's hard to say.
Even beyond that, we're talking a group that has become a monetary target only in the last few years VS groups that have been larger targets for 20 to 30 years. A percentage of people in older generations have either learned from past experience or have had their "keys" taken away in a way young adults fundamentally can't have.
I remember this being on an elementary school IQ test: Why do people in China eat more rice than people in America?
The answer was "Because there are more people in China."
Thats a pretty terrible question though since there are two equally valid ways of viewing the question the way it is worded. It's not talking aboit China, it's talking about people in China. People in South Korea eat more rice than people in Colombia despite both countries have similar populations. "Why does China consume more rice than America" is the actual question to ask yo try and get that answers.
Huh?
The question isn't "why is MORE TOTAL rice eaten in China than America?"
There simply being more people in China doesn't mean Chinese people choose to individually eat more rice. There are other reasons for that per person choice.
Both are totally legitimate interpretations. It doesn't specify what they're talking about beyond "people in China" which can either mean individually or collectively. It's meant to be a trick question, though, which is why it's worded so ambiguously.
"people in China" does not mean the same thing as " the Chinese populace".
People in China means consider the individual experience of a person, then generalize.
It does not mean "as a cumulative total"
It can definitely mean either. Sorry bro.
Cool, but that's not how semantic coding works. I know it's popular to say "language evolves" but logical Grammer means something still.
I wonder if this is due to the rise in parasocial relationships to internet personalities?
Lots of streamers push scam grifts onto their audiences, and I see scammers also using images of Elon Musk or Mr. Beast a lot. Feels like the Gen Z equivalent of those guys who call old people and pretend to be a relative in need of bail money.
No its just lack of experience combined with over confidence. Same as traffic statistics, where the absolutely majority of accidents are by young males.
Lots of confidence, but no experience. We were all there once, so nothing strange about it.
Is cyberbullying a scam now? I feel like that might be pushing up the Gen Z numbers a bit.
Yeah, and a lot hinges on the definition of cyberbullying. If they mean a sustained and targeted campaign of bullying, that's one thing, but if it's just being the target of toxic behavior on the internet that's pretty easy to trip over on social media.
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
You grew up surrounded by technology and the internet. I was born in darkness. I didn't even get my first Nigerian Prince email until I was 13 years old.
I think it's just a certain type of person the non tech savvy type that are prone to getting scammed. Gen Z's life is more internet/tech focused than the boomers so there's more of them to scam.
Correct answer, even if boomers did use computers some, they are aging out of using them.
My dad completely stopped years ago. My mom literally just checks email from me and my sister. And it's losing the ability to do that.
Telephone scams on the other hand...
I feel like the numbers are mostly from all the bitcoin-type scams that so many influences have pulled.
I mean come to think of it, it's not that surprising. Lots of gen z started using the internet, mobile phones, etc when we were pre-teens or a little older. Even now, a good portion of gen z is still under 18. Of course that demographic would be targeted by online scammers, and of course they'd be more susceptible than adults.
It felt to me like the adults in my life didn't have much more experience with internet-related issues than we did. It gives me a little hope that maybe we'll be able to do a better job teaching our kids internet safety (in all its forms), since we have more experience than our parents did when we were younger.
Still, maybe not. Maybe the internet evolves too fast for that to make a difference, and maybe ten years from now we'll be figuring out a whole new set of problems. It's just interesting to think about imo.
Children easier to scam than adults, more at 11.
Gen Z is in their mid 20s now
The oldest are in their mid 20s, but the youngest are tweens/early teens depending on what years you define their generation by, which is kind of a sweet spot of smart/capable enough to get themselves into trouble, but not smart enough to avoid it or get themselves out of it.
The results from this relies entirely on the honesty of those polled.
Now think about that.
I was thinking maybe Gen Z is just more aware these things are happening?
That was literally my first thought.
Maybe boomers are more embarrassed about being scammed (or just more private in general), and so basing all this on a self-reported study seems like a bit of a shaky foundation.
Would be great if they had some more data that wasn't from self-reporting..
90% of the time they're too stupid to even realize they've been scammed, and yes, they'll fall for the exact same shit twice, even three times. For a point of reference, imagine someone your age on their 4th crypto rugpull and replace that with a Nigerian prince.
This can be said for literally all self reported polls and studies. The thing is, generally widely accepted techniques are used to attempt to account for dishonest answers. This isn't a new problem, it's been worked on for a long time. It's not like scientists and pollsters have never considered that people might lie and just take it all at face value. There's just only so much you can do about it.
The only time I ever see this brought up is with explicit intent of discrediting the poll or study in question.
It's valid to be more skeptical of self-reported studies than studies that rely on harder evidence, but that doesn't mean polling and self-reported studies are worthless.
Maybe, but anecdotally my boomer aunt bought over $1,000 of apple gift cards and gave the card numbers over the phone to the “Apple support” guy with a thick Indian accent to get her hacked iCloud Photos back so…. I would like to see the different kinds of scams that both generations fall for.
The emulation handeld that are all dropshipped powkiddys
I would guess there's some pure exposure effect going on here. Gen Z are, almost to the person, constantly online. A lot of boomers rarely even check their email. They have more opportunities to be scammed online.
Kinda like how boomers are more likely than younger generations to sign into reverse mortgage scams partly because younger gens don't have houses.
another article where gen X doesn't exist.
It's for the best. We are the latchkey generation.
I'd never heard of this term. but yep that pretty much summed up my childhood.
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Lol I “fall” for scams to waste their time between meetings while I’m working on other shit. I fuck with the scammers just to troll them, and I’m proud of that.
I've heard romance scams are on the rise again due to the prevalence of online dating. If the hot girl you matched with starts asking you for money, or nudes (for extortion), or your mother's maiden name (for identity theft), she might not be the person you expect!
This one is so brutal and seriously fucked up.
Back in the day it was mostly just the good old story of the Nigerian prince wanting you to inherit his millions :(
Scammers used to be more wholesome and creative for real
That's the big one with Gen Z that I know of. I can think of several that I know that fell for it while 16-22, but none that fell prey to the typical ones about your SSN or buying gift cards.
Aren't late 1990s Millenials?
No, millenials end at around 1994-1996 last I checked. These generations are weird because as an early gen z (1999) I'm closer to the last millenials than to a genz that was born in like 2007.
Yeah I was also born in 99. I'm really not sure where I fit in sometimes.
The cut off is also different depending on where you lived
Not at all. I’m barely a millennial and I’m early 90s. Millenials are mostly 80s babies
I love the ageism in this thread and online forums in general. When there's an article "boomers bad" everyone falls over themselves to agree. When there's an article that (ostensibly) points the opposite way we can't wait to tell anecdotes about how actually it's still the boomers that are bad. There are always good reasons for this or that perceived failing of the younger generations.
To be clear I'm not defending either "side" here. The whole generation war is a ridiculous nonsense, including drawing arbitrary "gen whatever" lines at specific years.) But it goes to show how easy we are to play with stupid simplistic headlines like this even though we, especially here in the "fediverse", like to think of ourselves as more rational / informed.
This just in: people expect more from allegedly older and wiser people (who spend a fuck ton of their time moralizing to the rest of us) than they do from younger, less experienced people.
Way to miss the point. This ridiculous "us vs them" is just the corporate media's latest way to drive a wedge between us.
A stupid meaningless distraction to get out attention away from real issues.
Don't know if it's because of some of the illegal sites/software I've downloaded, but I've been getting occasional emails for sex with Ukrainian women and just sex emails in general for a while. And yes I fall under the gen z category despite calling myself a millennial.
Isn't that just regular Spam?
Can't say since I've never got these type of spam email before.
You get those likely because you have a Steam account tied to the email. Valve sells your email.
Section 5 of their privacy policy explicitly states that they don't.
They personally don't, but they have ties with those who do.
I’ve been trying to reach you all about your cars extended warranty. So glad I finally found you!