Gen Z falls for online scams more than boomers do.
Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do Anyone can get scammed online, including the generation of Americans that grew up with the internet. If youâre part of Generation Z â that is, born sometime between the late 1990s and early 2010s â 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 theyâd 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 Catfishâs 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. âPeople that are digital natives for the most part, theyâre aware of these things,â 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 âdigitally nativeâ generations. While Gen Z had a high awareness of online security, they fared worse than millennials in actually implementing many cybersecurity best practices in their own lives. So, why? Why is the generation that arguably knows more about being online than any other ([for now]( so vulnerable to online scams and hacks? 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. Second, growing up with the internet gives younger people a familiarity with their devices that can, in some instances, incentivize them to choose convenience over safety. And third, cybersecurity education for school-aged children isnât doing a great job of talking about online safety in a way that actually clicks with younger peopleâs lived experiences online. âI think Gen Z is thinking about it. We have to live with these threats every day,â says Kyla Guru, a 21-year-old computer science student at Stanford who founded a cybersecurity education organization as a teenager. When she teaches classrooms of students about email safety or phishing or social engineering, she said, thereâs often an instant recognition. âTheyâll be like, âOh my God, I remember getting something really similar.â Or, âIâve seen a ton of these kinds of spammers in my Instagram DMs.ââ The kinds of scams that target Gen Z arenât too dissimilar to the ones that target everyone else online. 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 companyâs data & digital trust business. Younger people are more comfortable with meeting people online, so they might be targeted with a romance scam, for instance. âThey shop a lot online,â Gordon said, âand there are so many fraudulent websites and e-commerce platforms that just literally tailor to them, that will take them from the social media platform that theyâre on via a fraudulent ad.â Phishing emails are also common, she said. And while a more digitally savvy person might not fall for a copy/pasted, typo-riddled email scam, there are many more sophisticated, personalized ones out there. Finally, Gordon added, younger people will often encounter social media impersonation and compromised accounts. Older Americans also date, shop, bank, and socialize online. But for every generation except for Gen Z, the technologies that enabled that access werenât always available. Thereâs a difference between someone who got their first smartphone in college and someone who learned how to enter a password into their parentsâ iPad as a kid â the latter of which is much more the experience of a Gen Z or Gen Alpha, the generation following Gen Z that is rapidly approaching teenagerhood. Millennials, particularly older millennials, had occasional access to computers in school, but younger generations may have been issued laptops by their school district to use in the classroom at all times. Taken together, these differences have led to some educated speculation on what that shift might change about how people approach cybersecurity. If online mayhem feels like part of the cost of being online, might you just be a bit more accepting of the risks using the internet entails? This generational difference might lead younger people to choose convenience over security when engaging online with their devices, according to Debb. Social media apps like Instagram and TikTok are convenient by design. Install the app on your phone and youâll stay logged in, ready to post or browse at a momentâs notice. The app will send alerts with updates and messages, designed to get you to open it up. Debb offered a hypothetical: If Instagram made users log out every time the app closed and re-log in with two-factor authentication in order to reopen it, then Instagram would probably be more secure to use. Itâd also be extremely frustrating for many users. Older generations might be a little more accepting of this friction. But for those who grew up with social media as an important part of their self-expression, this level of security could simply be too cumbersome. But Gen Zâs online experience isnât really a black-and-white choice, where convenience lives behind one door and safety the other. Instead, online safety best practices should be much more personalized to how younger people are actually using the internet, said Guru. Staying safer online could involve switching browsers, enabling different settings in the apps you use, or changing how you store passwords, she noted. None of those steps necessarily involve compromising your convenience or using the internet in a more limited way. Approaching cybersecurity as part of being active online, rather than an antagonist to it, might connect better with Gen Z, Guru said. âWeâre the ones changing the scene in the future, right?â said Guru. âWeâre the ones doing activism around climate change or reproductive rights. And so I think your threat model changes the moment that you take on those kinds of responsibilities or those roles.â Thereâs another factor here, too: Many experts say that the responsibility for remaining safe while using these apps should not fall solely on the individual user. Many of the apps and systems that are designed to be convenient and fast to use could be doing a lot more to meaningfully protect their users. Gordon floated the idea of major social media platforms sending out test phishing emails â the kind that you might get from your employer, as a tool to check your own vulnerabilities â which lead users who fall for the trap toward some educational resources. Privacy settings should also be easier to access and understand. 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. âWhy do these scams happen, who is behind them, and what can we do about them? I think those are the last synapses that we need to connect,â she said. â A.W. Ohlheiser, senior reporter [illustration of a robot speaking with a podium while a scientist in a lab coat holds up a controller that says âSTOPâ]( CFOTO/Future Publishing via Getty Images [Stuart Russell wrote the textbook on AI safety. He explains how to keep it from spiraling out of control.]( [AI doesnât have to be superintelligent to cause serious havoc.]( [Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT. For Altman, the chatbot is just a stepping stone on the way to artificial general intelligence.]( SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty Images [AI thatâs smarter than humans? Americans say a firm âno thank you.â]( [Exclusive: 63 percent of Americans want regulation to actively prevent superintelligent AI, a new poll reveals.]( [An eyeball with the Google logo reflected in it.]( Leon Neal/Getty Images [Googleâs free AI isnât just for search anymore]( [Microsoft was first to AI search, but Googleâs Bard can now pull stuff in from Gmail, Docs, Maps, and more.](
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