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.

    • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      So this is a genuine question. When doing research online you have to click on random websites/links. How do you protect yourself from that?

      • Duamerthrax@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Use Firefox and run uBock Origin, Noscript, and Privacy Badger extensions. If something seems suspicious, google the url and see if people are talking about it.

        • aceshigh@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          i can’t use firefox and i had to turn off noscript forgot why though… i use/do everything else, so i guess i’m kind of safe.

          • MoodyRaincloud@feddit.nl
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            1 year ago

            No script is not an easy tool. By default, it breaks 99% of websites. It has become a game for me though to approve the lowest amount of scripts to make a site run, but I realize this is definitely not for everyone.

            • shitwolves@lemmynsfw.com
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              1 year ago

              It’s me as well. Most sites aren’t so bad, but then there’s those sites with like 45 items and one of them holds the key to the video I want to watch. I feel like there should be a crowdsourced whitelist that you could download for this.

      • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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        1 year ago

        Check the url. Not what the link displays as, right click or hover that shit and see what the real url is.

        Don’t follow links to sus.minemycrypto.sudan

        Not even to win an internet argument.