DMs, a quick buck: How Gen Z is falling prey to cyber scams

TTom hanks to AI, a surprising young cozenage dupe has emerged. It’s non the millennials folks, it’s the tech-savvy Gen Z.We’re living in an always-on digital world. We rely on it for 10 minute deliveries, for that latest dress, for mobile banking, deals and promotions, for quick, effortless personal loans and for getting cabs without IRL conversation.All the while, what we don’t realise is that it might be as risky as keeping the doors of our home wide open, all night, while we sleep.With the advent of AI, scammers have more sophisticated tools to predict our behaviour and sound more credible. Perhaps that’s the reason that their target has moved from technologically-challenged folks to the digital-first generation – Gen Z, who are just entering the workforce in the country. Global Anti-Scam Alliance (GASA), a nonprofit in Netherlands, surveyed 46,000 adults across 42 countries and found that most of the adults scammed constituted both Gen Z and millennials. Of those scammed, almost 75% adults felt confident in their ability to recognise a scam.“We have a huge challenge,” explains Jorij Abraham, Managing Director of GASA in the press release of the report. “73% of people worldwide feel confident they can recognize scams, however, nearly a quarter still lost money in the past year.” Abraham has a term for this -- confident vulnerability -- and it especially works against Gen Z, which believes it is savvy enough to smell a scam.Job or a quick buckThe emerging scam that is increasingly getting sophisticated and multi-layered as it targets people in their 20s is a job offer scam. In 2025, Gen Z lost a whopping $501 million to these scams globally, according to Moody’s Analysis of 2025 Fraud report. It found that young adults frequently fall for fake remote job listings on Telegram, Whatsapp, LinkedIn and Indeed.The job scam comes at multi levels now: “AI-powered website builders can create professional looking phishing sites in mere minutes,” says Luis Carrons, security evangelist, Norton, a cybersecurity company. Tools replicate a real site’s design, branding, customer service features and even fake social media handles.To further lure their victims, some scamsters even conduct fake interviews with clones using a real HR manager’s voice or a video interview over Skype or Zoom. They send offer letters and request personal information including bank account details, IDs and PANs. Afterwards they demand – depending on the story – a security deposit or a laptop setup fee. Or they might use the data you shared with them – copies of IDs, passports – for identity theft or create a synthetic identity with your details to use in future scams.The lure of quick or passive money remains tempting for Gen Z too, though the methods have changed. Many scammers post links of fraudulent trading apps on Instagram and Whatsapp groups, showing fake, massive profits on a digital dashboard. People download the app, add in their bank details and some money. The app shows profit, the victim adds more money. The app then asks for a high fee to withdraw their investment or even uses their bank account to launder stolen money.Love, DM and all that jazzThe most dangerous scams in the world, don’t look suspicious at all. They look helpful, familiar and urgent, pushing you to act fast. It’s the successful weaponization of human emotions and Gen Z is particularly vulnerable to it, points out Hemant Dabke, vice president and managing director, India and SAARC at Zscaler, a US-based cloud security company.“Scams always lean on urgency, fear, greed or the desire for connection,” he explains, adding that in the last couple of years, what’s changed is scale and realism – thanks to AI. Scams now feel more personal, thanks to bots that can scour people’s online world and include details such as their name, employer, school or recent purchases to convince them it’s a real email or message.Common social media scam tropes include fake brand collaborations where creators are sent ambassador offers over DMs or an impossible social-commerce deal that leads a fake site. Both disappear the moment a UPI payment is made.The other regular, which keeps working on Gen Z is love. Fake AI-generated profiles can now can be trained to DM people, have a real conversation, please them, remember details of their life, learn their emotional triggers and respond consistently and patiently, sometimes even for months. They can even produce deepfake videos to prove they are real. Once an AI bot develops this trust , it will pivot to a fake investment opportunity or a family emergency to extort funds. Or it would trick people into sharing intimate images to blackmail or threaten them, unless paid.Romance cons, which have stayed the same no matter which generation or what technology, come with the additional burden of shame, the reason they often go underreported. Mastercard’s 2025 Cybersecurity Survey found that 59% respondents said they would feel ashamed if they fell victim to an online scam, and about half said they would be embarrassed to tell anyone if they experienced a fraudulent transaction, leading to massive underreporting.Last year, losses and damages from cyberattacks came to a whopping $9.5 trillion, making cybercrime the third-largest economy in the world, according to Johan Gerber, the global head of Security Solutions at Mastercard. “This is growing, thanks to the widespread availability of AI tools to supercharge scams and accelerate attacks,” he says.Crime-as-a-service is also becoming common on the dark web. This sells amateur scammers pre-packaged phishing kits or OTP-bypass bots. According to ThreatLabz Phishing Report 2025, India is third globally in phishing attack volumes. In total, over 80 million phishing attempts were detected in India during 2024, accounting for about 33% of Asia’s total phishing volume.How to not be scammedAI-driven impersonation will keep growing, voice cloning is possible now with only a few seconds of voice, while video deepfakes are on the rise – they can easily impersonate family members, school officials or bosses.What remains the same in spite of sophistication in technology is how these emotional scams push victims towards quick decisions, payments, or sharing sensitive information, says Corrons, who has worked in cybersecurity since 1999. “Messages aim to trigger fear, guilt, or excitement to bypass scepticism,” he explains. It’s these, what he calls “classic” workhorses, that have worked from the 1990s and work even now – no matter the technology.GenZ has the intuition to understand how apps and platforms work. What they need to add is built-in zero-trust habits and a 30-second pause before clicking any link or scanning a QR code. “Never assume trust, always verify identity through a separate official channel and most scams will lose their power,” says Dabke.(An author and columnist, Shweta Taneja tracks the evolving relationship between science, technology and modern society)