Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do. The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.::undefined
King of obvious really by the sheer volume of manosphere, crypto, etc grift content out there.
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.
Plot twist: avocado toast is the scam.
Mmmmm scam
More scam, please
They are also falling for right wing trolls wrapped thinly in progressive language
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.
in fairness, it’s because y’all answer every question with “Yeah, totally…” and no one has any idea whether you’re being sarcastic
Word
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
I’ve had this conversation so many times with my partner. She’s on an older laptop in a room that’s directly through a pretty thick wall from the router, but its still a short distance to bring an Ethernet over, and she’s always using her laptop only at her desk there anyway.
She’s always yelling at me (who have my desk right next to the router, and everything I use has Ethernet ) that the internet is down again and that she really needs it right now, because work.
But no, getting angry at me that I should do something about it is fine, but that something apparently shouldn’t mean the most feasible solution.
I’m not dealing with a WiFi extender for a spot that’s literally like 8 meters from the router, for her 100mbs WiFi card.
But it’s her loss, at least I have the remaining 900mbps for myself from our plan…
Here, you can plug this into your laptop whenever the WiFi goes down and you need internet RIGHT AWAY. If you don’t need it urgently, then you don’t have to plug it in.
“But wires are ugly!”
Not if you keep them organized!
“No, they’re just ugly! Just fix the wifi so this doesn’t happen anymore!”
…yes dear
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.
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…
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.
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 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.
80yo grandma with a ultrafast 5G data plan bigger than mine. And her daily phone is a Doro that doesn’t even do text messages.
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 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).
Right, Linux printer drivers. I am the only person on the internet that solved the issue, as far as I can tell.
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.
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.
That’s wild to me that people consider using an android device to be technical in anyway. It’s literally designed to be user friendly enough for grandmas and grandpas to use. iPhones have really rotted some people’s brains.
It’s them blue message bubbles causing weird things to their brains.
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 😁
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.
You mean kids don’t have enough life experience to spot scams at first glance? No way!
I means if we’re talking about things like ordering from wish/temu (which I absolutely would) then yeah I can totally see this.
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.
Fuck desktop OS computers. You can be completely tech illiterate if you use MacOS and Windows only. Hell, even a lot of modern Linux distros are basically “Linux with training wheels.” You want to get really tech literate? Do what I did and use nothing but vanilla Arch for around 3 years, constantly installing new things that broke my install and having to fix it or just reinstall at least once every two months. The greatest teacher isn’t necessity. It’s frustration. The second greatest is the arch linux wiki.
I literally can’t tell if this is supposed to be a serious comment or a shitpost copypasta.
Little bit of both.
“i use arch btw”
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.
The difference now is that in the olden days when something broke you could fix it if you had enough technical know how. For some reason that doubtless involves money that I do not care to learn, companies have invested a staggering amount of R&D into making fixing anything as close to impossible as they can make it unless you are an authorized service technician.
Pop the hood on a modern car, you can change the wiper fluid and that’s about it. Apple is proud of their walled garden and parts pairing and is considering charging for the privilege of sideloading apps. Most applications nowadays don’t even show crash report data to the user and error messages are getting less and less descriptive for fear of being confusing. The only thing you can really pop the hood on nowadays is webpages, and even then you’ll often have to do at least an hour’s worth of reverse engineering to get anywhere useful.
That’s not the result of advancement, it’s the result of obfuscation. It’s a deliberate trend among companies to make us powerless to manage our own devices. They absolutely could make them in a way that is simple enough for an end-user to understand if they really wanted to.
Regardless of what caused it, the fact remains that people stopped learning how to fix their own crap because there’s hardly anywhere they can apply those skills.
I’m in a particularly techy subset of gen Z. Every electronic device I own is either jailbroken or running a different operating system than the one it shipped with. I use Linux exclusively which is a fancy way of saying I’m used to having to fix things when they break without any instructions on how to do that. I have trouble with tech meant for normies. They hide so much complexity it makes them impossible to troubleshoot. How can I expect people who were raised on tech meant to be seamlesa to mend the inevitable seams when I don’t know how?
It’s not their fault, is what I’m saying. I agree that interfaces nowadays are too user friendly.
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.
That feels like it should be illegal.
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.
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.
