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.
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.