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.
vox.com
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.::undefined
Millennials are probably the best at avoiding scams.
Unfortunately we also have no money to scam anyway.
It's because of all that avocado toast.
I stopped eating avocado toast and now I own a mansion and 5 supercars.
I knew you could do it!
Plot twist: avocado toast is the scam.
Mmmmm scam
More scam, please
Teenagers are bad at risk assessment...
This shouldn't shock anyone, but it makes boomers feel good about themselves and their lead addled brains can't handle the critical thinking to understand why this isn't the win they think it's is...
True. As a kid I'd fall for scams all the time, constantly downloading malware that would crash the family computer.
No way it went up 20x in 5yrs? There must be something weird with the data
Time online would naturally increase, but more importantly the pandemic would exacerbate that while also increasing the amount of people resorting to scamming.
There's multiple parts to the equation, called confounding variables.
You mean kids don't have enough life experience to spot scams at first glance? No way!
I'm surprised. Just like that time I was the 1,000,000th visitor of this well reputable website back in the day.
They can't use computers! Sorry to generalise, but I was called a genius for using the task manager and just basic Word formatting. The thing is, we do have our 10,000 hours, maybe I am the equivalent of a chess grandmaster in Word. It's just jarring to hear from a university student.
As a gen z, I agree-- I once used a terminal in front of one of my friends and he (unironically) asked if I was programming it myself.
From what I can see, it's because "screens" got so much easier to use there's been no need for countless nights of screaming at the laptop until you figure something out. I mean, it was not easy becoming fluent.
I am scared to see what will happen when iPad kids grow up and something doesn't work, their understanding of an app is an icon with a label that you click so it opens. No troubleshooting skills whatsoever, even googling a problem isn't an option for them.
I mean, there was that one time that I tried alpine linux w/sway and then spent ~30 minutes connecting to my friends wifi (this was when he asked if I was programming it myself).
Right, Linux printer drivers. I am the only person on the internet that solved the issue, as far as I can tell.
Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking the school or smth when I updated some stuff in termux.
That's wild to me that people consider using an android device to be technical in anyway. It's literally designed to be user friendly enough for grandmas and grandpas to use. iPhones have really rotted some people's brains.
It's them blue message bubbles causing weird things to their brains.
Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am somewhat tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking smth when doing an update in Artix...
I think that generalization is acceptable.
Most avoid computers. My parents use'em and click everything they come across with. Decade ago I installed Linux in their shitty old computer, just so I can remove everything they can use to screw up the OS.
Everything was fine for few years till my father bought a new shitty low end computer from the black friday with all kinds of support and additional warranty BS that needed Windows with VNC that they really didn't understand.
So, the result of that study is BS. One reason is that people selling old people expensive shit they don't need is not considered a scam.
Boomer mother using Samsung flagship device to use WhatsApp and literally nothing else? That contract is absolutely a scam.
80yo grandma with a ultrafast 5G data plan bigger than mine. And her daily phone is a Doro that doesn't even do text messages.
Late Gen X to early Millennial was the sweet spot between needing to know how a computer works and having a computer that just works. People before and after don’t have that experience.
I had a work colleague who had a spreadsheet with one column calculating something to do with a particular date. They didn't have any formulas at all. For any calculations. They would go in each day and manually calculate and then type in the values. In every cell.
I put in an input cell date, and simplest of formulas in 3 cells, and they looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.
I returned to my desk, put my head in my hands in sheer shock. I still don't understand what they thought a spreadsheet was for....It made.nice columns?
Anyways, when I recovered, I finished my resignation letter,.and that was the best thing I ever did in that particular cesspool 😁
There is a split in gen Z: The ones who didnt use a computer growing up and those that did have one (and also the time to mess around with it). But I feel like you cant group them together.
When I spoke to my younger half-brother a few years back I was stunned to find out he only had an Xbox and phone. No PC. I think he's doing well academically but how the fuck he lived without a proper PC I'll never know.
I think my dad and his mum refused to get him one to protect him cos they didn't let him play GTAV either. It was too violent.
I shudder to think WTF he'll do when AI comes along.
That'll be a very pronounced split in Millenials and Gen X as well.
They never played Runescape and it shows
One does not simply buying gf
They never heard of Theresa Fidalgo and it shows
Boomers fall for online scams because they aren't aware of how powerful the internet can make bad actors.
Zoomers fall for online scams because they're younger and simply inexperienced dealing with scam artists.
Millennials fall for online scams because we're lonely and really want the friendly Indian guy we're talking to to get their itunes gift card.
Gen X would love to fall for online scams however everyone keeps forgetting them.
in fairness, it's because y'all answer every question with "Yeah, totally..." and no one has any idea whether you're being sarcastic
Radical dude.
Yeah, totally…
Word
Gen Z are 11 to 26, younger when this study was done. Take out the youngest cohort of Gen Z and the oldest cohort of Boomers, then show me the new statistics. This is how you mislead with data.
Exposure to technology does not automatically breed expertise. I have a 15 year old. Smart phones have existed for her entire life. She knows how to use Snapchat and take goofy selfies. That's where her expertise ends. Any time anything is wrong, she sounds like her grandma complaining "mY mOdEm DoEsNt WoRk!" It's not a modem grandma! That's your computer! Most of her friends are the same way.
And "WiFi" is synonymous for "Interenet connection" to them.
Yea, kiddo, the WiFi is working just fine, but the ISP crapped its pants and you can't connect to anything past this house.
My partner is a millennial who grew up with computers, but never got too technical with them. She was confused when I told her that our WiFi was down at the router, but we still had an internet connection.
"If we have internet, why can't I connect?"
"But you said we still have an internet connection."
"...but if there's no WiFi, why does the cable work?"
Lol
Not to mention most ISP marketing is pretty loose in its terminology. Most if not all radio or tv ads these days seem to interchange internet and wifi as if they are one and the same on a daily basis.
ie. All ads stating something along the lines of "subscribe to whole home wifi for a low monthly fee."
I have too many conversations on both sides of the age gap trying to explain the difference between supplying your own router with its own wifi capabilities as opposed to a ISP modem/router combo.
I've had this conversation so many times with my partner. She's on an older laptop in a room that's directly through a pretty thick wall from the router, but its still a short distance to bring an Ethernet over, and she's always using her laptop only at her desk there anyway.
She's always yelling at me (who have my desk right next to the router, and everything I use has Ethernet ) that the internet is down again and that she really needs it right now, because work.
But no, getting angry at me that I should do something about it is fine, but that something apparently shouldn't mean the most feasible solution.
I'm not dealing with a WiFi extender for a spot that's literally like 8 meters from the router, for her 100mbs WiFi card.
But it's her loss, at least I have the remaining 900mbps for myself from our plan...
"But wires are ugly!"
"No, they're just ugly! Just fix the wifi so this doesn't happen anymore!"
When you grow up around something being easy to use, you lose the intricate understanding that used to be necessary.
For Gen X and Millennials, it's probably cars and/or electronics.
Busted light switch cover? Better call an electrician "just in case".
Need to replace an air filter? Better take it to the shop.
Not sure where the line is, but I had a Gen X woman tell me that she needs to take the car to the dealership to get her air pressure adjusted. When I showed her how to take off the cap on the tire's air pressure valve, she looked at me as if I had just pried off her steering wheel, lol
Not sure where the line is drawn, and there are definitely some people in those generations who know those things. But I'd bet Boomers and earlier generations had a better understanding on average.
To be fair, cars are becoming less and less serviceable.
I had a light bulb that died on my car, and tried to change it myself. How hard could that be?
Turns out the light bulb is so buried under the engine I ended up giving up and bringing it to the shop. And often even independent shops can no longer service cars, you have to bring it to your maker's dealership because only they have the proprietary tooling to fix it.
As a car enthusiast and backyard mechanic, this is precisely why I prefer to own older vehicles. If something goes wrong with my '06, I can handle that. My friends/family members with newer cars, by and large, can't even handle their own basic maintenance because of the way things are designed now. It's worse than planned obsolescence, it's engineered difficulty.
Want to change the oil? Good luck! the filter is behind the engine and right next to the exhaust cause fuck you. At this point I'll look at getting a roller and doing an EV swap.
I tried to replace my sister's serpentine belt a couple summers ago. Simple, basic maintenance, right? Turns out, the only way to turn the tensioner, was from underneath the car. I'm still mad about it.
That feels like it should be illegal.
They are also falling for right wing trolls wrapped thinly in progressive language
wish i could say i’m surprised. i’m gen z myself and i’d say i’m pretty decent with not being an idiot with technology. i do the usual stuff like running firefox + uBlockOrigin and i’m also a linux user. anyways, people at my school are just… so dumb with technology. a bunch of people have lost permission to use their school chromebooks and a computer at school because they got malware on it. either by going to a pirate site or just clicking a random download button (my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers). not to mention that most of them believe that macs cannot get malware. so yeah, i’m unfortunately not surprised with this
I thank getting into pcgaming for pushing me towards tech literacy. With how simplified tech has gotten and most usage being phones it's not surprising so many are more clueless than boomers who were at least forced to use PCs in an office setting.
that’s similar to what happened to me. i wanted to make a ROM hack for super mario world. fast forward 3 years later and im now using a jailbroken iphone and dual booting win10 and fedora
wtf why
Because you can potentially install other extensions, chrome and edge will suck with uBO soon anyway, and you cant install exe's or chocolatey, too restricted.
yeah that’s probably it
i really wish i knew
Same here, people look at me like an alien when I say that I use an android (no root anything) or a jailbroken iPhone. I've met people that don't even understand the concept of a folder...
Getting malware on a chromebook is hard. How did they manage that. I thought it was even more locked down than ios?
i’m honestly not sure. i should probably ask the school IT guy because he had to ban a few people from using chromebooks. we are allowed to download things so that’s probably it though.
King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
If there's one thing I've noticed about Gen Z purely from interacting with them online it's that they're incredibly, remarkably gullible. Like, broadly resistant to the concept of facetiousness, sarcasm, or that they might be being taken for a ride. They take everything at face value. I once made the joke on reddit that the greatest Disney villain of all time was Cobra Bubbles from Lilo and Stitch because his backstory was that he used to work for the CIA before becoming a social worker, which meant there was a non-zero percent chance he helped train Osama Bin Laden in insurgency tactics in the 1980s and was therefore indirectly responsible for 9/11. The zoomers were both confused and outraged because they believed me entirely at face value. I would imagine them applying a similar degree of online literacy to your average dark pattern scam that said "click here for free V Bucks." There are no V Bucks, dog. There's never any V Bucks.
I'm not sure that is any different than any other generation. Hell, I doubt you know the age of all the people you're talking about.
If you ask my grandparents the whole US is being destroyed by immigrants despite their day-to-day being the same for decades.
All I gotta do is point out Newsmax and Fox News viewership to counter this stupid Zoomer vs Boomer shit. Just because they are less terminally online doesn't mean they are less gullible.
*Person criticizes Zoomers*
Random Zoomer: "Yeah, well, THE BOOMERS ARE WORSE."
I'm not even a zoomer. I'm just trying to not be sensationalist like the source.
By the source I assume you mean me, and not the article. Because I'm not being sensationalist. I'm being unfair and judgmental. Very different things.
No I mean the source. You're just being anecdotal and that's ok.
Vox is being charitable to the Zoomers, though, observing that "Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology." The original study is also in a peer reviewed journal. It's not making judgment calls about Zoomers. It's aggregating statistical data. You can read the article here: https://vc.bridgew.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1052&context=ijcic
From the discussion of findings at the end of the article, the researchers observed that
"It is reasonable to assume that the safer practices the older group self-reported is accompanied by greater knowledge of information security simply because of the additional years of being engaged in a digital-technology world. Specifically, it was hypothesized that Generation Y would rank higher than Generation Z adults on the OSBBQ Cybersecurity Awareness subscale, and significant differences were observed for half of the items included in the analysis."
And also that
"From a developmental perspective, it is possible that the normal adaptations that occur throughout one’s life impacted how individuals in this study perceived the literal meaning of the items. This could be due to cultural differences inherent to their generational cohort and the individual experiences that occur over time with age. For example, people tend to lose their sense of invulnerability as hey age (Denscombe & Drucquer, 1999) and generation Y adults grew up in a world where adapting to privacy and cybersecurity threats were first becoming more commonplace. These individuals are now at an age where the realities of (online) risk have become part of their conscious awareness as it relates to their lack of invulnerability."
Like, this formal study is incredibly generous in its discussion of why Gen. Z might be shown to be more statistically likely to fall for online scams than other cohorts. It also goes into great detail to explain its own limitations as a study.
That study seems to be a survey of college students knowledge of cyber security not anything to do with what you were claiming before as there are no boomers in question.
Yes, they acknowledge that as well when they discuss the sample population. Baby Boomers are literally not a part of it. The title of the Vox article is just drawn from a Deloitte industry survey. Which has no real context or judgment around it - it's purely a reporting of aggregate statistics. The Vox article just attempts to explain why Zoomers, a generational cohort that grew up with the internet, might be more statistically prevalent for succumbing to those scams compared to Baby Boomers, who were fully adult when the internet became widespread. The superficial presumption is that you would expect the opposite - the older generations have little to no familiarity with modern technology and are more easily victimized by it. That presumption is all the Vox article is discussing, really, and why it's probably not correct.
So you agree the article is sensationalist? Why link me a study that is irrelevant for no reason?
The article is not sensationalist. Please quote me a part of the article that you feel is and I can address the statements that make you feel that way.
Because that study is referenced as one of the primary sources the article uses to provide evidence for the phenomenon it discusses. The link to that research paper is literally in the article. It's critical to the article.
You just broke it down on how it sensationalized some completely bs data because boomers aren't online as much as zoomers. You've gotta be trolling with this
I have no evidence of who's falling for my 'trolling' online but it's very similar to what you describe. I'll make some absurd, nonsense claim or insult them using flowery nonsense language that can't possibly be taken seriously - but they do!
I suggested that Java devs (programmers) are the reason we'll never have FTL engines. They took me seriously!
Yet there's other times you'll get obviously younger people screaming in comments under videos "FAKE!" because they can't conceive that the video'd thing could happen.
In that instance I can understand it to a degree because they don't have the lived years experience to compare what they're seeing on screen. You'll get them claiming "that would never happen" or "people don't do that and if you think it's real go touch grass" and I'm thinking - "hang on that's happened to me at least 3 times".
I understand it's probably just the arrogance of youth but it's quite shocking at times just how confident they can be of their own ignorance.
I know people who teach high school and they say that Gen Z has both an extreme degree of personal esteem and that they won't take shit from anyone who disparages who they fundamentally are as people (like people giving shit for them being from immigrant families, being POCs, being LGBT, etc.), which is fantastic - no one should ever put up with shit like that. But they also seem to have a very hard time organizing their thoughts and making logical conclusions from structured evidence. Like they can't write a paper making an argument for something and providing evidence for why something is a certain way. It's all stream of consciousness. I think that as a generational cohort they might be more inclined towards "unstructured thought" or perhaps "stream of consciousness" than other generations. As old as I might sound because of this opinion, I do think that the fact that they interact with information almost entirely through mobile devices is a potential component of that. The mechanisms and mediums by which you consume information arguably shape how you process information.
genX are the perps. shhhh dont tell anyone. no one knows were here
This is also why we are more likely to notice it. Some of us could teach the scanners a thing or two.
Yeah I'd say growing up coding in Basic on DOS machines, and logging onto BBSes gives us a leg up over millenials who at best started with AOL and Windows 98
I think they're way more used to just giving information away without thinking about it. "They have everything already, why fight it" just plays into the hands of scammers.
Well yeah, there's a lot more of them on the internet.
So... based on this headline... studies from the NFT craze a year and a half ago are finally coming out.
And people have unirinically said that zoomers don't need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.
I feel like the scams are just more intracate nowadays.
They're really not. I got one just this morning, your credit has been placed on hold for your AmEx card, log in to update your info... Yeah ok I don't have any credit cards, and besides why is a pet boarding domain sending me AmEx emails? If you can't spot something that obvious then you really don't deserve to have a bank account.
Have you seen the scams that spoof your banks phone number so it looks official, only way to check if it is real is to call back.
Are you referring to actual phone calls? I mean everyone should know by now that phone numbers can be easily spoofed, we see that in every call claiming we need a new credit card or car insurance. The easiest way to see if a call is a scam is to force them to go off-script. Like when they start asking for personal info like your SSN... you called me, why don't YOU know my information? Of course they'll say they need it to verify who I am, and I'll just tell them that they should already know who I am since they called me. Another big tell is if they want more than just the last four of your SSN... absolutely no legitimate agency will ask for the entire thing over the phone.
I guess it just depends on how much free time you have, but sometimes I just like messing with these people to waste their time. Some will get downright angry when they realize you have no intention of falling for their scam, but mostly they just hang up.
Thats a dumb one but I had emails come from the real domain of the company.
Sounds like a company that shouldn't be trusted if they're getting hacked that easily?
things will be worrying when people Deepfake family members
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“People that are digital natives for the most part, they’re aware of these things,” says Scott Debb, an associate professor of psychology at Norfolk State University who has studied the cybersecurity habits of younger Americans.
In one 2020 study published in the International Journal of Cybersecurity Intelligence and Cybercrime, Debb and a team of researchers compared the self-reported online safety behaviors of millennials and Gen Z, the two “digitally native” generations.
But because Gen Z relies on technology more often, on more devices, and in more aspects of their lives, there might just be more opportunities for them to encounter a bogus email or unreliable shop, says Tanneasha Gordon, a principal at Deloitte who leads the company’s data & digital trust business.
Staying safer online could involve switching browsers, enabling different settings in the apps you use, or changing how you store passwords, she noted.
Gordon floated the idea of major social media platforms sending out test phishing emails — the kind that you might get from your employer, as a tool to check your own vulnerabilities — which lead users who fall for the trap toward some educational resources.
But really, Guru says, the key to getting Gen Z better prepared for a world full of online scams might be found in helping younger people understand the systems that incentivize them to exist in the first place.
The original article contains 1,313 words, the summary contains 228 words. Saved 83%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
But these are sophisticated scams where the scammer sounds exactly like Uncle John and he wants you to help him out with some chips and a Costco gift card for Amazon. That's pretty normal because your uncle doesn't like going to the mall.
It's not like the boomers sending all their money because a prince is going to invest it in recovery his kingdumb or something like that and then pay it back tenfold.
I means if we're talking about things like ordering from wish/temu (which I absolutely would) then yeah I can totally see this.
Why do we have names for generations? Stupid.
Because "the youngest cohort falls for online scams more than the oldest cohort" means the same thing but communicates far less information.
Yeah, it's become the new sports teams. Everyone loves blaming their problems on whatever generation they least identify with, when realistically there's no fair way to judge an entire generation and no fair way to compare groups with such large age gaps and wildly different experiences growing up.