early 2010s as ending birth years

Which means, depending on what exact years you’re going with, the youngest gen z are roughly 13 years old, possibly younger, and roughly half of them are minors, I think it’s fair to call those parts of the demographic children in a lot of contexts. Most of them aren’t old enough to drink, only a handful of them are old enough to rent a car from most companies. Most of them are still in school, still living at home with their parents (not that I’m throwing shade, I was still living at home at their age, my wife didn’t finally graduate until she was in her 30s, that’s just kind of the way things are these days for a lot of people)

Teenagers and younger 20-somethings are capable of a lot of things, but they have little to no firsthand experience with the real world. They know enough to get themselves into trouble, but not enough to avoid trouble or get themselves out of it. That’s just part of growing up.

I know plenty of people the same age as me who fell for various kinds of scams in their teens and 20s, a lot of craigslist scams, MLMs, various phishing emails, sending money to random online “friends” only to have them disappear afterwards, every week someone’s Facebook was getting hacked, etc. And while we grew up with the internet, a lot of the potential avenues for scams hadn’t really fully matured yet, so it was easier to sort through the noise. There wasn’t a whole lot of user-generated content and many websites didn’t need any kind of account to use, so after you learned not to click the flashing banner ads saying you won something and ignore weird emails, you were mostly pretty safe, and we adapted to all the new stuff as it came around and mostly learned how to sort out the good from the bad.

If we’d been thrown headfirst into the internet of today, I’m sure we would have fallen for just as many if not more scams.

There’s probably also a lot more research now into who is falling for what kinds of scams and how frequently. If you got scammed in 2003, there’s a good chance not too much came of it, maybe you had to close some bank or credit card accounts that got compromised, but cops often wouldn’t really know what to do about it, you couldn’t really post about it anywhere unless you had your own blog, Myspace was just getting started, Facebook wasn’t out yet, maybe your 12 friends on xanga would read about it. And unless some survey taker at the mall or at your college or something asked you about it, there probably wasn’t too many good ways for researchers to gather data about your experience from you.

Nowadays everyone has their own little soapbox, there’s a lot of ways for people doing research on this sort of thing to find you and reach out, and overall it’s a lot better understood.