this post was submitted on 25 Sep 2023
403 points (90.2% liked)

Technology

59347 readers
5385 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do::The generation that grew up with the internet isn’t invulnerable to becoming the victim of online hackers and scammers.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 92 points 1 year ago (10 children)

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).

Does this control for the fact that Gen Z are simply online a lot more than Boomers?

I can’t tell what these are percentages of. 16% of scammed people were GenZ? 16% of GenZ have experienced a scam? Because both of those would be skewed if, for example, 100% of GenZ use the internet daily and 20% of Boomers have never used it.

Once again, a journalist doesn’t know how to present statistics in a meaningful way. They do this 72%!

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I think it has more to do with age and experience than generational labels. Kis who "were just born yesterday" or "are still wet behind the ears" have always been, and always will be gullible. Everyone needs to be fooled a few times before they "wise up". We need to stop all generational finger pointing and bigotry.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My kid and his friends were convinced they would get $100 of free stuff from Temu, but only if they got 10 people to download the app. I tried telling them it was bullshit marketing but since they "heard so and so got $100 then it will work.". I downloaded it just to get them to shut up and deleted it.

Temu. Fucking Temu? It's the dollar store wish.com and that's saying something.

Anyways, it obviously didn't work and haven't heard about Temu since, then I'm pretty sure they realize their mistake.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Gen Z falls for online scams more than their boomer grandparents do

Temu is legitimately malware. The company had their source dumped and they obfuscated their malware-like practices to avoid Google's automatic detection. I presume they did the same with their iOS client. It is very telling that they have been extremely successful despite the same exact company and team doing this before with another app, Pinduoduo. That's right; same dev team and everything. Temu goes above and beyond the normal surveillance capitalism stuff we are used to and circumvents system security in order to sell your raw data on the market. The entire scheme isn't to build a retail space (although it is doing that as well); it is to get as many people to download the app so they can steal an absurd amount of data which is normally protected.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Pinduoduo is the parent company of Temu. Of course it's going to be the same dev team.

This is like saying you're surprised Instagram shares code and engineers with Facebook.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Referral codes aren't exactly uncommon for new apps, especially if VC money is involved.

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (6 replies)