Are you smarter than a 15-year-old?
When it comes to online scams, probably.
While senior citizens remain by far the most victimized group overall, losing nearly $2 billion last year in online scams, the surge of Gen Z victims has been alarming.
SocialCatfish.com released a study on the State of Internet Scams 2022 and found that money lost by victims under 20 years old (who are typically tech-savvy), grew by 1125% over the last five years compared to 390% for seniors.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people were home a lot more and were online more, said SocialCatfish founder and CEO David McClellan. There was a lot of money being given to people in the forms of stimulus checks, and extra unemployment benefits, to name a couple.
Therefore, he said there was an uptick in scams, not only in New Jersey but across the country and even worldwide.
Victims lost as much as $18,000 per scam, McClellan said.
Why are teens falling for online scams?
People think that those who fall victim to scams are dumb but the study found that is not the case: 75% of victims had some college education or completed college education.
But McClellan said loneliness and isolation are what pushed them into falling for these online scams.
He said there is a huge uptick in romance scams among teens. With the pandemic, people weren’t going out and meeting others for future dates.
“People started falling for a lot more romance scams. We also noticed that they weren’t only happening on dating sites. They were…
