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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!
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.
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
Honestly a lot actually has changed in that time.
So much info has leaked that it's a lot easier to phish users than ever. There are dumps of usernames and passwords, so you can know several websites they use as starting points for fraud.
Password reuse and credentials stuffing are also common now, which means if teens reuse passwords you can get into manu of their accounts.
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.
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.
They never played Runescape and it shows
One does not simply buying gf
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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?"
Because the WiFi isn't working.
"But you said we still have an internet connection."
Well, I do, and so would you if you'd let me run an ethernet cable to your office, too!"
"...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.
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Gen Z is also less tech savvy even though they've only known devices and screens since they were born so this isn't surprising.
Even though? I don't think it's a correct assumption that "devices" would or should make you tech savvy. Smartphones and tablets makes you less tech savvy I'd say. Proper desktop OS computers is where it's at.
It doesn't matter if it's smartphone or desktop it's the not quite working part is what got millennials tinkering and understanding technology
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I dont think this is the case. I feel like there just is a much wider gap because some people grow up without a computer (they may have one but not see the use of it) and others do. I bet you'd be surprised both at how non-tech-savvy and at how tech-savvy some genZ-ers are.
I have had people asking me for help because their "keyboard was capitalizing everything" (caps lock was on) or being amazed by touch typing. But there are also many people who are (at least somewhat) tech-savvy and it's not so few people either.
What I've heard, and what makes sense, is that Millenials had to learn technology and troubleshoot all the issues for their parents.
Now that they're grown up, they continue to troubleshoot issues for their kids and fix any issues.
So their kids don't get that same experience.
This is more of a generalization of course, there are absolutely genZ-ers who are tech savvy.
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They've only known devices which were built with such a curated UX that they never tried to troubleshoot problems for themselves. When I was a kid you had to be able to figure out how to edit config files and tweak registry keys to get your PC game to run. These days everything is so smooth and seamless. Oh sure, stuff still breaks. But the computers are pocket sized and run on a locked-down OS, so there's no point trying to troubleshoot them yourself.
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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.
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(my school doesn’t allow us to use adblockers)
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.
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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...
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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.
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King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
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.
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And people have unirinically said that zoomers don't need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.
Well yeah, there's a lot more of them on the internet.
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.
So... based on this headline... studies from the NFT craze a year and a half ago are finally coming out.
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.
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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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