Millennials are probably the best at avoiding scams.
Unfortunately we also have no money to scam anyway.
this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2024
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It's because of all that avocado toast.
I stopped eating avocado toast and now I own a mansion and 5 supercars.
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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.
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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.
They can't use computers! Sorry to generalise, but I was called a genius for using the task manager and just basic Word formatting. The thing is, we do have our 10,000 hours, maybe I am the equivalent of a chess grandmaster in Word. It's just jarring to hear from a university student.
As a gen z, I agree-- I once used a terminal in front of one of my friends and he (unironically) asked if I was programming it myself.
From what I can see, it's because "screens" got so much easier to use there's been no need for countless nights of screaming at the laptop until you figure something out. I mean, it was not easy becoming fluent.
I am scared to see what will happen when iPad kids grow up and something doesn't work, their understanding of an app is an icon with a label that you click so it opens. No troubleshooting skills whatsoever, even googling a problem isn't an option for them.
I mean, there was that one time that I tried alpine linux w/sway and then spent ~30 minutes connecting to my friends wifi (this was when he asked if I was programming it myself).
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Same here, I have the nickname "hacker" at school just because I use an android and am tech savy. I have seen people that didn't know what a folder was, thx apple, and thought I was hacking the school or smth when I updated some stuff in termux.
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I think that generalization is acceptable.
Most avoid computers. My parents use'em and click everything they come across with. Decade ago I installed Linux in their shitty old computer, just so I can remove everything they can use to screw up the OS.
Everything was fine for few years till my father bought a new shitty low end computer from the black friday with all kinds of support and additional warranty BS that needed Windows with VNC that they really didn't understand.
So, the result of that study is BS. One reason is that people selling old people expensive shit they don't need is not considered a scam.
Boomer mother using Samsung flagship device to use WhatsApp and literally nothing else? That contract is absolutely a scam.
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Late Gen X to early Millennial was the sweet spot between needing to know how a computer works and having a computer that just works. People before and after don’t have that experience.
I had a work colleague who had a spreadsheet with one column calculating something to do with a particular date. They didn't have any formulas at all. For any calculations. They would go in each day and manually calculate and then type in the values. In every cell.
I put in an input cell date, and simplest of formulas in 3 cells, and they looked at me like I was some kind of wizard.
I returned to my desk, put my head in my hands in sheer shock. I still don't understand what they thought a spreadsheet was for....It made.nice columns?
Anyways, when I recovered, I finished my resignation letter,.and that was the best thing I ever did in that particular cesspool 😁
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Boomers fall for online scams because they aren't aware of how powerful the internet can make bad actors.
Zoomers fall for online scams because they're younger and simply inexperienced dealing with scam artists.
Millennials fall for online scams because we're lonely and really want the friendly Indian guy we're talking to to get their itunes gift card.
Gen X would love to fall for online scams however everyone keeps forgetting them.
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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.
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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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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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.
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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.
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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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King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
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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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.
I disagree partially with this article. While not every gen z tech consumer is a Linux user. Not all of them fall for scams. It's rather, the people who are so invested in certain franchise like Fortnight, and trying to get free robux or vbucks. Or trying to get free gift cards to get free curency to buy games on console storefronts. There a some that are gen z the do exersize common sense. Being a gen z myself, I would say I am one of those that do exersize common sense guarding form scams.
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Well yeah, there's a lot more of them on the internet.
So... based on this headline... studies from the NFT craze a year and a half ago are finally coming out.
And people have unirinically said that zoomers don't need to learn computers and tech because advancements in UI have made that obsolete.
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