• @knittedmushroom@beehaw.org
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    842 years ago

    Hm, like most opinion pieces, there aren’t any hard numbers from studies really shown besides the initial percentages. And I immediately picked up on the second paragraph’s

    Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.

    Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix! They’re one of the first generations that have had to deal with their peers harassing the everloving shit out of them all hours of the day online. As a millennial, I didn’t have to even think about putting up with that until at least high school. I’d really want to see what questionnaire wording they were using for the survey data. If the question was legitimately “Have you ever been a victim of phishing, identity theft, romance scams, or cyberbullying?” then I think almost everyone with a social media account for their whole life would need to check “yes.”

      • Pigeon
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        22 years ago

        I also wonder if they controlled for the fact younger people are online more often in the first place.

    • @Reil@beehaw.org
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      152 years ago

      Yeah no shit those metrics will skew towards Gen Z being more victimized if you’re lumping cyberbullying into the mix!

      They’re high in each of those categories individually, not (just) if you add the categories together and compare the totals. Millennials are slightly higher in Romance scams and identify theft though.

      BUT these numbers are also self-disclosed. I’m not sure how you’d correct for this in a survey, but I could easily believe that these two generations are simply more likely to realize they’ve been victimized, and have a higher exposure to the internet (and thus to scams).

      I’d be more interested in something like a sit-down test, to be honest. It’d be easier to account for time spent online and self-awareness of victimization, and more likely to isolate “internet street smarts”, as far as I can tell.

  • mal099
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • @tburkhol@beehaw.org
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      82 years ago

      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.

      • mal099
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        12 years ago

        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.

  • Binthinkin
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    162 years ago

    And Windows is a huge red flag for this. Literally two OS’s working at the same time make it a shit product. One OS for legacy users who know what cmd and control panel are and the new junk system where they want to circumvent the first OS and slither all of your information to their shit tier One Drive. One Drive is iCloud without security.

    Absolutely garbage and cannot wait to feel confident in a dual boot or just straight Linux because this is just stupid tech making people helpless and hamstringing them as per usual.

    • jlow (he/him)
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      12 years ago

      What’s keeping you from switching to Linux? I only boot into my Windows install when I need effing Adobe for client work, everything else is working (mostly) smooth on Linux. Do backups with Backintime or Timshift before updating and you should be good.

  • @blindbunny@lemmy.ml
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    92 years ago

    I worked in fraud until it broke my soul. Yeah I believe it. The amount of young adults that fall for Facebook scams especially is pretty staggering.

    • @acastcandream@beehaw.org
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      72 years ago

      A bunch of my millennial peers acting like their boomer parents with “kids these days” and “back in my dad we had common sense!” takes despite promising themselves for decades they’d have at least a tiny bit more humility than the aforementioned overly judgmental parents.

  • NightGaunts
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    2 years ago

    I am a gen-x boomer and was doing cyber bullying for a while, mostly targeting gen z. This article certainly catches the spirit of my work Maybe one day they will finally add a button that will prevent these ‘online’ scams, until then, be wary/where.

    • Rhaedas
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      32 years ago

      gen-x boomer

      As a Gen-X I have to ask what exactly is meant by that. That you openly admit cyber bullying gives some hint, but I’d rather get a self definition than to assume.

  • Gaywallet (they/it)
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    2 years ago

    Surveys are really interesting in that, they often find things that are quite strange, and you are left wondering who was included and who wasn’t. For example, I found it kind of surprising that gen z and millennials are way more often to ‘touch grass’ than the older generations

    but it may make sense in the context of who actually got polled - I know I wouldn’t bother to fill out an online poll or one that I received in the mail without compensation, and I suspect a decent amount of disconnected individuals would feel similarly. It was an online survey, so it’s not too surprising that they caught people who are connected to the internet, but its kind of surprising they found people who are rarely online.

    • Chris RemingtonOP
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      32 years ago

      This is a very insightful and informed take. TBH, I did NOT do my due diligence of critical thinking before posting this article. I’ve succumbed to knee jerk reactions once again.