Crypto moment
Stupid article, most of Gen Z aren’t even 21 yet, of course they’re gonna fall for scams, they’re teenagers or younger lol. I got scammed loads of times on RuneScape as a kid, and that taught me better than anything else how to avoid scams.
Considering that Gen Z is usually defined as being born between the mid-late 1990s and early 2010s, I wouldn’t support the first half of that statement. Everyone born in the first half of 2005 or earlier are 18, making them adults, so about half of Gen Z is adults.
Now whether this article uses that age range properly or whether it’s just someone using the term to mean “young people”, I have no idea.
But the premise of the article that just because someone uses technology all day makes them somehow invulnerable to scams (something that has absolutely nothing to do with how much someone uses tech) was ludicrous from the start.
just someone using the term to mean “young people”
Rude. How dare they stop using “Millennial” to mean “young people”. They weren’t supposed to recognize that some of us are in our 40s now!
Millennials: we’re all adults now, we want to be taken seriously!
Time: passes
Millennials: never mind we’ve made a mistake let’s go back
Accurate. I’d like to go home now.
The US census used 1997 - 2013 as the range. Which gives us an age range of 10-26, making the median age 18 - and I was thinking of 21 as adult, rather than 18 - which is why I said “they’re teenagers or younger” - but yes, you’re right, “only” 40%-ish of gen Z are under 18 :p
Run the same survey again in 11 years and compare 21+ gen Z to 2023’s boomers and I bet the results aren’t even close.
You cannot determine median based on range alone. You basically need to know how your datapoints (people in this case) are distributed to be able to actually calculate the median, because the 50th percentile does not have to lie smack in the middle between the extreme ends of your range.
Hm, like most opinion pieces, there aren’t any hard numbers from studies really shown besides the initial percentages. And I immediately picked up on the second paragraph’s
Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.
Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix! They’re one of the first generations that have had to deal with their peers harassing the everloving shit out of them all hours of the day online. As a millennial, I didn’t have to even think about putting up with that until at least high school. I’d really want to see what questionnaire wording they were using for the survey data. If the question was legitimately “Have you ever been a victim of phishing, identity theft, romance scams, or cyberbullying?” then I think almost everyone with a social media account for their whole life would need to check “yes.”
Self reporting is also notoriously unreliable
Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix!
They’re high in each of those categories individually, not (just) if you add the categories together and compare the totals. Millennials are slightly higher in Romance scams and identify theft though.
BUT these numbers are also self-disclosed. I’m not sure how you’d correct for this in a survey, but I could easily believe that these two generations are simply more likely to realize they’ve been victimized, and have a higher exposure to the internet (and thus to scams).
I’d be more interested in something like a sit-down test, to be honest. It’d be easier to account for time spent online and self-awareness of victimization, and more likely to isolate “internet street smarts”, as far as I can tell.
Considering what the boomers and Gen x have put the millennials through, I’m not surprised they’re susceptible to romance scams.
Also worth considering with self-report that Gen Z may just be more open about their failings
The headline is pretty misleading. Reading the headline, I was imagining Nigerian Prince scams. But in the article, they state “Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.”
Teens get bullied more than the elderly? Say it ain’t so!
While GenZ is, according to their source, also the generation with the highest percentage of victims if phishing scams, it’s actually millenials that fall for identity theft and romance scams the most.The article also states that 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.”
The source for Social Catfish’s claim is data released in 2023 by the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. According to that data, in 2022, there were 15,782 complaints for internet crime by victims under 20 totaling $210.5 million in losses. In the same year, there were 88,262 complaints by victims over 60, totaling $3.1 billion in losses.Every generation since the beginning of times has claimed that the following generation was rude, stupid, and stopped doing things the “right way” like we used to do in the good old days. It has always been bullshit, it will always be bullshit. Stop stressing, the kids are alright.
“Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology.”
That’s part of it for sure, but anecdotally I also find that Gen Z people often have quite a shallow, even naive understanding of the technology they use every day. Probably due to modern interaction design valuing simplicity above everything else.
Or because they’re probably 15 years younger than you are and are learning just like we all did. God imagine if crypto was a thing when we first got internet connections.
@admin this is a result of the enshittification of technology. You’re no longer forced to learn, you’re only displayed a button that you need to press. Doesn’t matter what will the button do behind, just blindly trust that it does what it says it does.
That is not what enshitification means.
Enshitification refers to a very typical capital-driven developer pattern in which (particularly social media) platforms gradually forsake the things that make them great for their users and business partners in order to increase profits, ruining the platform in the process.
It has nothing to do with technology being easier to use. Being easier to use is better. It’s about technology becoming a worse product, the opposite of being easy to use.
We should not be deliberately gatekeep technology to make it hard to use to weed out less knowledgeable users. That is some elitist bullcrap. We should hold all the platforms to a higher standard when they facilitate these scams and we should be serious about investigating and getting rid of the scammers.
This seems needlessly gatekeepy to me. Are you saying everyone using technology needs to learn exactly how it all works? People aren’t allowed to just use the tools provided to them? Like are cameras worse now that you can just point and shoot vs having to go through many steps for the photo to maybe turn out ok?
I have to say that learning how to pick out the actual download button from all the other “download” buttons is one of the most crucial steps in making yourself resistant to online scams.
Really, yeah, people today use computers on more than an hourly basis. But that doesn’t automatically make someone more technologically literate. It’s no longer a hard requirement to understand how a computer (I’m lumping smartphones, PCs, Macs, etc.) works in order to do useful operations with it.
That’s not enshittification it is a normal progression of tech to make it useful for a wider audience. Otherwise we would be typing a byte at a time with front panel toggle switches like on a PDP-8.
And Windows is a huge red flag for this. Literally two OS’s working at the same time make it a shit product. One OS for legacy users who know what cmd and control panel are and the new junk system where they want to circumvent the first OS and slither all of your information to their shit tier One Drive. One Drive is iCloud without security.
Absolutely garbage and cannot wait to feel confident in a dual boot or just straight Linux because this is just stupid tech making people helpless and hamstringing them as per usual.
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Click this link for discord nitro free!
😮 Where’s the link? I don’t use Discord but I like free /s
Anything is free if you just grab it and walk away!
I’m so used to seeing damned bots spamming that everywhere, my half asleep ass immediately reached for the report button lol. It’s just instinct now. Pavlov’s Discord Nitro.
Surveys are really interesting in that, they often find things that are quite strange, and you are left wondering who was included and who wasn’t. For example, I found it kind of surprising that gen z and millennials are way more often to ‘touch grass’ than the older generations
but it may make sense in the context of who actually got polled - I know I wouldn’t bother to fill out an online poll or one that I received in the mail without compensation, and I suspect a decent amount of disconnected individuals would feel similarly. It was an online survey, so it’s not too surprising that they caught people who are connected to the internet, but its kind of surprising they found people who are rarely online.
This is a very insightful and informed take. TBH, I did NOT do my due diligence of critical thinking before posting this article. I’ve succumbed to knee jerk reactions once again.
I worked in fraud until it broke my soul. Yeah I believe it. The amount of young adults that fall for Facebook scams especially is pretty staggering.
I’ve no idea what’s going on in this entire thread
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I am a gen-x boomer and was doing cyber bullying for a while, mostly targeting gen z. This article certainly catches the spirit of my work Maybe one day they will finally add a button that will prevent these ‘online’ scams, until then, be wary/where.
Why were you cyber bullying gen z kids?
Before I got rid of Instagram, I would see lots of my friends accounts promoting some crypto thing. They say they got “hacked” but they just weren’t thinking
