this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
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The headline is pretty misleading. Reading the headline, I was imagining Nigerian Prince scams. But in the article, they state "Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying."
Teens get bullied more than the elderly? Say it ain't so!
While GenZ is, according to their source, also the generation with the highest percentage of victims if phishing scams, it's actually millenials that fall for identity theft and romance scams the most.
The article also states that 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."
The source for Social Catfish's claim is data released in 2023 by the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. According to that data, in 2022, there were 15,782 complaints for internet crime by victims under 20 totaling $210.5 million in losses. In the same year, there were 88,262 complaints by victims over 60, totaling $3.1 billion in losses.
Every generation since the beginning of times has claimed that the following generation was rude, stupid, and stopped doing things the "right way" like we used to do in the good old days. It has always been bullshit, it will always be bullshit. Stop stressing, the kids are alright.
Who are these kids under 20 with $14,000 to give out to scammers? Retirees with a spare $35k, I believe, but I'd really like to see the distribution for both. I'm guessing the means and medians are very different.
Got a point there, but it's what the sources say. One possibility might be that it's the teenagers that got scammed (or even just filing the complaint?), but their parents' accounts that got emptied. This part of the report is unfortunately really lacking in detailed descriptions of the data.