with 70,791 recorded victims losing an average of $2,789 each. The older the victims were, the more money they lost on average. In 2020, people in their 30s lost an average of $5,570, while those in their 40s lost an average of $7,832. The oldest Americans, on average, lost the most money to online fraud.
Nowadays, everyone does business and pleasure on the internet. It doesn’t matter if it’s teenagers, adults, or older people. The possibility of being defrauded through internet platforms has always existed. With the tremendous rise in popularity of online platforms, online trading, dating applications, and other similar services, the chance of being scammed has skyrocketed.
If you believe yourself to be a millennial who is immune to all scams or an elderly who thinks he has had enough experience to fall for a scam, the con artists have you right where they want you. As a result, cybersecurity professionals and businesses have been equally as quick to design and deploy fraud-prevention strategies.
As a result, advice on how to protect oneself online is always changing to match new security standards and avoid the latest fraudulent schemes. As a result, a wide range of security technologies, such as antivirus software for individuals, machine learning for fraud detection platforms, and other solutions like device fingerprinting to assist enterprises in the battle against fraud have become popular.
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As the Number of Social Media Users Grows The Number of Scams Directly Increases
The significant majority of internet users had grown up in a digital domain until recently and had to discover cyber risks later in life. This also meant that they had not been sought by online fraudsters in their childhood, leading to the assumption that the majority of online fraud victims are elderly people with limited internet skills and knowledge about scams.
Consequently, a new generation of digital natives is now approaching middle age. As a result, they are more accustomed to using the internet, having been exposed to it since childhood. In accordance with the statistics from the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center gathered in 2020, according to a report by fraud protection firm SEON.
People under the age of 20 had the greatest year-over-year increase in fraud reports between 2019 and 2020, according to SEON’s “Gen-Z Fraud Report.” The number of young people who reported fraud increased by 116% from the previous year to 23,186. They lost a total of $70.98 million in 2020 or roughly $3,000 per person.
In 2020, there were nearly half a million victims of online fraud, with 465,177 individual cases of online fraud documented in just one year. This amounted to total losses of just about 3.3 billion dollars, which is roughly the same size as Liberia’s whole GDP, demonstrating how significant these losses are.
This indicates that each case of internet fraud in the United States is worth around $7,000 on average, a figure large enough to put the ordinary person in significant financial trouble. These data, however, should be taken skeptically because they represent all cases of online fraud in the country. This holds true for businesses as well as people, who stand to lose significantly more than the typical person. As we go deeper into the statistics, we will be mindful of highlighting how these figures change between age groups and across different sections of the country.
Scammers Are Targeting People of All Age Groups!!
Individuals in their 20s, the next youngest age group, saw a 59 percent surge between 2019 and 2020, with 70,791 recorded victims losing an average of $2,789 each. The older the victims were, the more money they lost on average. In 2020, people in their 30s lost an average of $5,570, while those in their 40s lost an average of $7,832. The oldest Americans, on average, lost the most money to online fraud.
A total of $966 million in losses was reported by over 105,000 people aged 60 and up, an average of more than $9,100 per person. By far, based on scam reports, the largest increase in casualties in 2020 was among those under the age of 20, with numbers more than tripling after an increase of 116.21 percent.
This age group likewise saw the greatest increase in 2019, albeit at a considerably lower percentage increase of 17.47 percent. This indicates that online scammers are targeting young people, and more work needs to be done to educate young people about online hazards and provide them with the tools they need to protect themselves.
In contrast to prior years, the number of fraud victims increased dramatically in 2020, with each age group seeing a 50 percent increase. This suggests that, in recent years, there has been an increase in online fraud, maybe as a result of the epidemic, which has resulted in more individuals spending more time online.
The 50-59 age group is the one that loses the most money on average in the United States, with an average loss of $9,864. The 60+ age group follows closely behind, with an average loss of $9,174. The fact that the two oldest age groups had the biggest average losses backs up the theory that elderly people are still the most vulnerable to online fraud.
The 20-29-year-olds, on the other hand, had the lowest average losses per fraud victim, with an average loss of $2,789. The Under 20 category had the second-lowest average losses of $3,061 per fraud incidence, indicating that the youngest two age groups lost the least money per fraud occurrence. However, rather than being targeted less, this could merely be because young individuals have lesser assets to lose than their elders. According to the SEON analysis, the reason that younger people lose less money on average is that they have fewer financial assets. It didn’t imply that they were being singled out more.
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Consequently, people aged 50-59 had the biggest average loss per person ($9,864), while those aged 20-29 had the lowest average loss ($2,789). Those under the age of 20 had the biggest percentage increase in online fraud victims (116.21), while those over the age of 60 had the lowest (54.82). Under-30s made up the majority of online fraud victims in Iowa (80.22 percent of a total) and had the largest average losses in the District of Columbia.
Sources
- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/20/how-much-money-different-age-groups-lose-to-online-scammers.html
- https://seon.io/resources/gen-z-report-online-fraud/
- https://newsnetdaily.com/how-much-money-different-age-groups-lose-to-online-scammers/
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