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.
This can be said for literally all self reported polls and studies. The thing is, generally widely accepted techniques are used to attempt to account for dishonest answers. This isn’t a new problem, it’s been worked on for a long time. It’s not like scientists and pollsters have never considered that people might lie and just take it all at face value. There’s just only so much you can do about it.
The only time I ever see this brought up is with explicit intent of discrediting the poll or study in question.
It’s valid to be more skeptical of self-reported studies than studies that rely on harder evidence, but that doesn’t mean polling and self-reported studies are worthless.