I’ve heard romance scams are on the rise again due to the prevalence of online dating. If the hot girl you matched with starts asking you for money, or nudes (for extortion), or your mother’s maiden name (for identity theft), she might not be the person you expect!
or nudes (for extortion)
This one is so brutal and seriously fucked up.
Back in the day it was mostly just the good old story of the Nigerian prince wanting you to inherit his millions :(
Scammers used to be more wholesome and creative for real
Dear Zoomers:
I love you guys, you have so much heart and clarity of purpose.
But goddamn you guys are slow
Yeah… I feel like somewhere along the way, zoomers didn’t get exposed to something essential, which millennials did get. The real problem is figuring out what that is before too many generations are lacking it.
When millennials were kids, the adults were so fascinated with their aptitude for messing with obscure DOS settings to get their games to run or programming VCRs, that the media did the tech whiz kid trope constantly (e.g. Star Trek, SeaQuest, Hackers, etc, etc). Having to deal with early electronics with arcane interfaces and fickle behavior forced them to have a comprehensive understanding.
The generation that grew up with more point and click experiences did not inspire that same “holy crap, the kids understand this really hard to use technology” and the trope in media died out. They were not forced to understand the workings of the technology to enjoy it.
Similar for cars, people who owned cars in early days pretty much had to understand the nitty gritty, because they’d screw up so often and on the road with little recourse to call for help. Nowadays people largely don’t know how their cars work, because they are more reliable and even if they have a problem on the road, they have a phone in their pocket to get professional help immediately.
I think you overestimate the rate of people who actually dealed with these issues. Rural car owners probably knew a lot how to do themselves, but many people still ran to the repair shop for small things (Source: my dad was a car mechanic in the 80s). In the same wake, how many kids do you think really had computers and messed around with them at the time? If half the kids in the 90s were computer nerds, nerds wouldnt have gotten bullied so much. Also the amount of millenials that i have to show around basic computer stuff at work is staggering.
So all in all we overhype the prevalence of certain lifestyles because they are overrepresented in media and stories of people in our own bubble.
Couldn’t this just be a reporting bias? Boomers wouldn’t even realise getting scammed, and if they do, would be too proud to report it.
We might have a different bias at play - a boomer able to adjust to new media and do an online Deloitte survey are self selected as being intelligent and have strong critical thinking skills. While i would be hard-pressed to find a zoomer that couldn’t do an online survey.
At the end of the day the selection bias may not apply in a meaningful way as the type of boomer unable to navigate through a simple multiple choice survey would likely not be using the internet in the first place.
For example my dad is 73 and has never used a computer in his life. Worked as a gardener and never needed it for work. He sends letters to his close ones or lets me or my mom do the typing for him. So there’s 0 chance of him getting scammed.
The younger boomers and older gen X would have likely used computers for about 30 years now so would be much more adapted to it as this point. It’s not the year 2000 anymore
Lol I “fall” for scams to waste their time between meetings while I’m working on other shit. I fuck with the scammers just to troll them, and I’m proud of that.
