.Millennials and Gen Z Get Scammed More than Their Grandparents
Millennials and Gen Z Get Scammed More than Their Grandparents, Sorry
By Maxwell Strachan Jan 3 2020
“There's a sense of complacency that can develop if you feel like, ‘Oh yeah, my grandma is vulnerable to this stuff, but I'm not.'"
Close your eyes and picture someone at the wrong end of an online scam. Who do you see? Odds are the person looks something like a helpless old lady with thick horn-rimmed glasses and an unsettling willingness to fork over her bank information.
But these days, that years-old stereotype is far from accurate. Tired depictions of naive old woman have masked an unnerving fact: It’s computer-literate millennials and Gen Z who have the real problem with online scams.
In recent years, people ages 39 and under have been 25 percent more likely to report losing money to fraud than the 40-plus crowd, according to the Federal Trade Commission. That translates to $450 million of lost millennial money over a two-year period ending in August.
The truth is, many Americans who came of age before the internet have approached online payments with a healthy dose of skepticism, which has proven useful as the internet has transformed into particularly fertile ground for fraudsters.
Younger people who have practically grown up online, however, have displayed a comfort with handing over personal information that is now regularly backfiring on them.
Today, millennials are less likely to fall for scams over the phone than people over 40, but 77 percent more likely to get duped by email scams, and 90 percent more likely to lose money on a fake check scam, like when a person you don’t know asks you to deposit a check and wire some of that money back to them, according to the FTC.
When it comes to online shopping scams, things get particularly bleak: People in their 20s and 30s are more than twice as likely to report getting swindled than older Americans—in the past two years, millennials and Gen Z have lost $70 million to buying items that are never delivered or not at all how they’re advertised
“When we're looking at the differences in reporting [between age groups], it's really, really jarring,” said Monica Vaca, the associate director of the FTC’s division of consumer response and operations.
Loss Reports by Millennials: Top 10 Frauds - Millennials are more likely than other generations to report losing money on many frauds, but less likely on other frauds. Fraud types ranked by number of loss reports per million people 20-39. Percentages indicate the difference in loss reporting rates by people 20-39 as compared to people 40+.
1. Online Shopping
2. Business Imposter Scams
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