Which Generation Actually Falls for Scams Most? The Data Might Surprise You.
I want to start by admitting something. I've made the joke before. The one about "sending this to your parents because they'll click on anything". I've made it on this platform, I've made it in casual conversation, and if I'm being honest with you, I never once stopped to check if it was actually true. Turns out, it isn't. Not anymore. And the data on this just came out strong enough that I think it's worth eating a little crow.
A report out this week, drawing on FBI, FTC, and Deloitte data, found that Gen Z, people currently between about 14 and 29 years old, have surpassed baby boomers in both how often they're targeted by scams and how often they actually fall for them. Not "catching up". Surpassed.
Let That Sink In for a Second
Here's the actual math. According to FBI statistics, people under 20 filed more than 31,000 fraud complaints in 2025, totaling $67.1 million in losses. People aged 20 to 29 filed more than 112,000 complaints, totaling $563.1 million in losses. That's over half a billion dollars, from a single decade of age, in a single year.
Separately, a Consumer Federation of America analysis found that scams and fraud now cost the average US household more than $1,000 a year. And a global Avast survey backed this up from a completely different angle; about a third of Gen Z respondents said they'd been targeted by a scam in the past year, and 61 percent of those targeted actually fell for it. For baby boomers, only 17 percent reported being targeted, and of those, 36 percent fell victim. Do the full math on that and Gen Z is getting scammed at roughly triple the rate of boomers, once you account for both exposure and susceptibility.
I want to say clearly; this doesn't mean older adults are immune, or that I am pivoting away from talking about scams targeting seniors. It means the story we've all been telling ourselves, the one where "vulnerable to scams" is basically a synonym for "older", was never the whole picture. And I think it's worth asking why we believed it so completely in the first place.
So Why Did We Get This So Backwards?
I think there are two honest reasons, and neither one is flattering to my own generation's assumptions.
The first is a numbers illusion. Older adults who do get scammed tend to lose more money per incident, because they often have more savings to lose. A retirement account drained by a fake tech support call makes headlines in a way that a 22-year-old losing $200 to a fake concert ticket never will. Big, dramatic dollar figures stick in our memory even when the underlying pattern of who gets targeted most often looks completely different.
The second reason is what I'd call the confidence trap, and this is the part that genuinely surprised me. Gen Z isn't falling for scams because they don't understand technology. A Global Anti-Scam Alliance survey found that 90 percent of Gen Z respondents felt confident they could recognize a scam. Ninety percent. But only 30 percent said they always verify a request for personal information before acting on it. That gap, feeling confident versus actually double-checking, is exactly where scammers walk right in. There's actually a name for this in psychology, the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with limited experience in something tend to overestimate how good they are at it. Being "chronically online" apparently isn't the same skill as being scam-proof, and I think a lot of us, myself included, assumed those were the same thing.
It's Not a Tech-Literacy Problem, It's an Exposure Problem
Here's the part of this story I find most interesting, and honestly, most useful. John Wilson, a senior threat researcher at the cybersecurity firm Fortra, put it about as plainly as I've heard anyone say it; if a scammer wants a big single payout, they target an older person with a lifetime of savings. But if a scammer wants volume, they go where the people are, and right now, that's social media, gaming platforms, and messaging apps, exactly where younger generations spend the majority of their time.
Payments Canada found something similar just this week: nearly half of Canadians aged 18 to 24 were targeted by payment fraud in the past year, more than double the national average, with email and instant messaging as the two most common channels scammers used to reach them. A separate Kaspersky study found 65 percent of Gen Z reported experiencing a cyber incident in the past year, compared to just 26 percent of baby boomers.
The pattern across every single one of these reports is the same; it's not about who understands technology better. It's about who's spending the most hours in the exact digital spaces scammers have learned to hunt in. More time online simply means more chances to be targeted, and Gen Z, by a wide margin, spends the most time online of any generation alive today.
What This Actually Means for Your Family
I wrote a piece last week about how awkward it is for an adult child to bring up internet safety with an aging parent without it landing as condescending. I stand by every word of that piece. But I think this new data adds something important to that conversation, maybe the most important thing; safety conversations in families shouldn't run in one direction anymore.
If you're an adult child who's had "the talk" with your mom or dad about not clicking suspicious links, it might be worth having a version of that same talk with your younger siblings, your kids, or honestly, yourself. If you're an older reader who's ever felt talked down to about your phone habits, I want you to actually feel something different reading this: relief, maybe, or at least the confirmation that the stereotype was never fair to begin with. You were never the weak link. None of us get to claim that title exclusively, because right now, the data says the generation most confident about spotting a scam is also the one falling for them most often.
I don't think the answer here is picking a new generation to worry about instead of the old one. I think the answer is finally treating this as what it's always actually been; a human problem, not an age problem. Scammers don't care how old you are. They care how much time you spend somewhere they can reach you, and right now, that happens to be everyone, just for different reasons at different ages.
What I Actually Want You to Take From This
If you take one thing from this post, let it be this: the next time you're tempted to send a scam-warning article to your parents with a "be careful, love you" text, consider sending the same article to your college-age kid, your younger coworker, or yourself. The data says they need it just as much, maybe more, and they're a lot less likely to think anyone's coming for them.
We're not each other's weak link. We're all targets in a system that's gotten very good at finding whoever happens to be looking at their phone the most. That's not a generational failure. That's just where all of us live now.
Michael Routhier is the founder of Tech 4 Grown-Ups, providing honest, unfiltered digital literacy for adults 55+, and host of The Virtuous Machine, exploring the ethics and human cost of AI. Read by tech-curious readers in 200+ countries. Explore more at tech4grownups.com.
Comments