Younger generations may want to think twice before going, “OK, boomer.”
A new study has found that teenagers in Pennsylvania are falling for scams far faster than their grandparents.
- SIMILAR STORIES: Pennsylvania city among top 15 best for Gen Z: study
Social Catfish—an online platform dedicated to preventing online scams through reverse technology—recently compiled its “State of Internet Scams 2022″ study “as an extension of Social Catfish’s mission to protect consumers from Internet scams.”
“Americans lost a record $6.9 billion to online scams in 2021, up from $3.5 billion in 2019,” reads the study. “The amount lost has nearly doubled since the global pandemic began in 2020 as people were forced to work, shop and date online.”
So, the website looked through the most recent annual reports by the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) as well as the Federal Trade Commission to get a finger on the current scam pulse.
This—combined with a poll romance scam victims as well as insight from a previous scammer—allowed Social Catfish to discover that Pennsylvania was not only the fifth most scammed state in the U.S. with a total of 17,262 (and a total loss of nearly $207 million due to scams), but that reports of victims under the age of 20 spiked by a whopping 1126 percent between 2017 and 2021. In comparison, seniors saw a 390 percent increase within that same timeframe, although this demographic remains the most victimized with an overall $1.68…
