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
I mean, they did elect a meme president. What bigger scam can you think of?
What about millennials then? We spend a lot of time online and yet are doing better
We don't have 15-year-old immature brains. Gen z are lovely bunch, but many of their brains are still baking.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
While we're on the topic of shit boomers and zoomers fall for:
STOP
RAWDOGGING
RANDOM
HYPERLINKS
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."
You miss 100% of the ~~shots~~ online scams you don't ~~take~~ get exposed to when it takes you 5 minutes to type in a url.
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.
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.
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.
There are a few theories that seem to come up again and again. First, Gen Z simply uses technology more than any other generation and is therefore more likely to be scammed via that technology
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.
Children easier to scam than adults, more at 11.
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.
Is cyberbullying a scam now? I feel like that might be pushing up the Gen Z numbers a bit.
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
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.
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.
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