Got a point there, but it’s what the sources say. One possibility might be that it’s the teenagers that got scammed (or even just filing the complaint?), but their parents’ accounts that got emptied. This part of the report is unfortunately really lacking in detailed descriptions of the data.
The headline is pretty misleading. Reading the headline, I was imagining Nigerian Prince scams. But in the article, they state “Compared to older generations, younger generations have reported higher rates of victimization in phishing, identity theft, romance scams, and cyberbullying.”
Teens get bullied more than the elderly? Say it ain’t so!
While GenZ is, according to their source, also the generation with the highest percentage of victims if phishing scams, it’s actually millenials that fall for identity theft and romance scams the most.
The article also states that the “cost of falling for those scams may also be surging for younger people: Social Catfish’s 2023 report on online scams found that online scam victims under 20 years old lost an estimated $8.2 million in 2017. In 2022, they lost $210 million.”
The source for Social Catfish’s claim is data released in 2023 by the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. According to that data, in 2022, there were 15,782 complaints for internet crime by victims under 20 totaling $210.5 million in losses. In the same year, there were 88,262 complaints by victims over 60, totaling $3.1 billion in losses.
Every generation since the beginning of times has claimed that the following generation was rude, stupid, and stopped doing things the “right way” like we used to do in the good old days. It has always been bullshit, it will always be bullshit. Stop stressing, the kids are alright.
I would steal this argument, but if it can be reposted here for free, then I don’t think anybody really owns it. 🤔
Here’s the study, for anyone who wants to read it. It’s surprisingly short and open access.
A few things:
The participants took Wasabi supplements once a day for 12 weeks, not just normal Wasabi. In each pill, there was 0.8 mg of the active compound (6-MSITC). Quick googling gave me the following for the level of that compound in actual Wasabi:
In other words, you could actually also get the same amount of 6-MSITC that was in the supplements by eating a few grams of regular wasabi each day, assuming that the processed stuff still has similar levels. The abstract provides a reasonable summary of the study, and of the fact that it agrees largely with some previous science on the subject (although there’s not a lot, two studies in small journals):
They tested the study participants once before and once after the 12 weeks of daily wasabi supplements. The participants were not tested for any long term cognitive effects.
As someone else has pointed out here in the comments, the study does list a Wasabi company as one of the sources of funding:
Also, I don’t want to poison the well too much, but I feel like I should mention that the editorial board of the journal resigned in 2018 because the publishers “pressured them to accept manuscripts of mediocre quality and importance”. Doesn’t mean it’s all bad, but it’s a very early study and more research should be done.