Anyone can get scammed online, including the generation of Americans that grew up with the internet.
If you’re part of Generation Z — that is, born sometime between the late 1990s and early 2010s — 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 they’d 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 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.
While that’s true, the boomers entering the “oldsphere”, to coin a term, are the ones adjacent to Gen X who weren’t scared of personal computers when they started to become a thing during the 1980s. They’re people who have been using computers in offices for the last 30+ years, and they’re very used to how they work. I genuinely think they’re less likely to fall for an online scam.
Older boomers, sure, but those are people who were, as a group (individuals are different! I can name plenty of awesome technically skilled boomers of that age group, I’m just making a generalization which for statistical purposes is reasonable) were more suspicious of computers and which contained a large number who managed to reach retirement age without going into jobs that absolutely required computer knowledge.
Those people are not the majority of people crossing the 60-65 age barrier today.