The Scam Warnings Aimed at Grandparents Are Missing Gen Z

Federal fraud data tell a sharper story about who scammers target than the one most people still carry around. In a December 2025 report to Congress, the Federal Trade Commission stated plainly that "older adults reported losing money to fraud at a lower rate than younger adults," a pattern it called consistent with prior years. That finding sits awkwardly next to a financial literacy segment recorded by five students at the International Community School of Bangkok (ICS Bangkok) for their weekly podcast, Students Incorporated, in which the hosts warned their teenage listeners that scammers "tend to prey on the elderly and others who may be more naive to their tactics."

The instinct wasn't wrong, exactly. It's just increasingly out of date, and the very numbers the hosts cited on air already hinted at why.

A Warning Built on Last Decade's Assumptions

On the episode, hosts Mia, Maddie, and C worked through a financial literacy segment aimed squarely at their teenage audience, closing with a stretch on fraud. Citing U.S. figures, they told listeners that Americans lost around $12.5 billion to fraud in 2024, a 25 percent jump from the year before, with investment scams accounting for $5.7 billion of that total and imposter scams another $2.9 billion. The FTC's own year-end accounting, published in March 2025, backs up those figures almost exactly: consumers reported $12.5 billion in fraud losses in 2024, and investment scams topped every category at $5.7 billion, a 24 percent increase over 2023.

What that report doesn't fully capture, and a newer one does, is where those losses increasingly start. In an April 2026 release, the FTC found that reported losses to scams beginning on social media hit $2.1 billion in 2025, an eightfold increase since 2020, making social platforms the costliest point of contact scammers use, ahead of phone calls, email, and text combined for most age groups. Investment scams launched through social media alone accounted for $1.1 billion of that total, more than half, often starting with an ad or post promising to teach viewers how to invest, or a WhatsApp group full of "successful investors" posting fabricated testimonials. Shopping scams were the single most reported type, with more than 40 percent of people who lost money on social media saying they'd ordered something, anything from clothes to car parts, off a post that turned out to be fake.

Those are exactly the platforms where a teenage audience, not a retiree one, spends its time, which is the quieter half of the FTC's age data. Older adults do lose more money per incident: the FTC's December 2025 report to Congress put the median reported loss for people 80 and older at more than $1,600 in 2024, among the highest of any age group, and said the disparity has stayed "particularly large" for that oldest bracket. But the same report is explicit that frequency and severity have split apart: younger adults are the ones most often reporting an actual loss, even if the checks written to them tend to be smaller. Elder fraud remains real and devastating in dollar terms. It just isn't the whole picture the hosts thought they were relaying to their own peers.

A Trivia Round Doubling as a Wake-Up Call

The scam segment came at the end of a longer stretch built almost entirely as call-and-response trivia, a structure that, whether the hosts intended it or not, mirrors exactly the kind of instruction researchers say American teenagers are missing. The 2025 P-Fin Index, produced by the TIAA Institute and the Global Financial Literacy Excellence Center (GFLEC), found Gen Z respondents answered just 38 percent of personal finance questions correctly, the lowest score of any generation measured, well behind baby boomers' 55 percent. More than a quarter of Gen Z respondents said they weren't confident in their own financial knowledge, and 62 percent reported they couldn't cover even one month of expenses from savings outside a retirement account.

GFLEC is a fitting name to land on here, because the episode's own quote of the day, credited on air to "Anna Maria Lussati, an Italian economist" (an evident mishearing of Annamaria Lusardi, the Italian-American economist who directs GFLEC), argued that "financial literacy is not an end in itself, but a tool to achieve financial well-being and security." The hosts then spent roughly forty minutes trying to be exactly that for their own listeners.

The trivia covered real ground. Asked to define compound interest, one host called it simply, "Interest on interest. The longer you let it grow, the more powerful it becomes." Asked about spreading risk across investments, another put it more plainly:

"It's like not putting all your eggs in one basket."

On market timing versus consistency, the hosts cited economist Jeremy Siegel's research from Stocks for the Long Run to argue that regular investing beats trying to guess market highs and lows, noting that stocks have historically returned roughly 6.5 to 7 percent annually after inflation over the past two centuries. They also cited a retirement statistic with its own warning built in: per the Employee Benefit Research Institute's 2023 Retirement Confidence Survey, only 27 percent of retirees said they felt very confident they'd have enough money to live comfortably throughout retirement, down from 33 percent the year before, one of the sharpest year-over-year drops the survey has recorded since the 2008 financial crisis. "Planning early really matters," one host said, using the number to make a case for urgency to an audience that won't retire for another five decades.

That urgency is showing up in policy, too, just not anywhere near Bangkok. As of late 2025, Delaware became the 30th U.S. state to guarantee students a standalone, semester-long personal finance course before graduation, according to Next Gen Personal Finance's tracking of state requirements, with Colorado, Hawaii, Kentucky, New York, North Dakota, and Texas adopting similar mandates the same year. Once every adopted requirement is fully phased in, NGPF projects that roughly 76 percent of American public high schoolers, the graduating class of 2031, will be guaranteed at least one dedicated personal finance class, about two million more students a year than are covered today. ICS Bangkok isn't bound by any U.S. state mandate. Its students built a rough version of that class themselves anyway, one podcast segment at a time.

Wealth That Doesn't Survive Its Own Family

The segment's last stretch turned from earning money to keeping it, when the hosts brought up what they called "the three generations curse," the idea that family wealth built by one generation tends to disappear by the third. It isn't a myth teenagers invented. A widely cited 20-year study by the wealth consultancy Williams Group, which tracked more than 3,200 wealthy families, found that 70 percent lose their fortune by the second generation and 90 percent by the third. The firm traced most of that collapse to breakdowns in family trust and communication, responsible for roughly 60 percent of failed wealth transfers, with inadequate preparation of heirs accounting for another quarter.

The hosts' own read tracked closely with that finding, without the benefit of having seen the research. One suggested the third generation "didn't have to work it. They all take it for granted." Another pointed to the absence of "a plan to teach them how to manage it." Their prescribed fix, professional advice paired with honest family conversations about money starting young, lines up closely with what wealth researchers actually recommend, arrived at independently by teenagers thinking the logic through out loud.

The Segment as Its Own Case Study

A school podcast's financial literacy segment was never going to move fraud statistics or state legislation on its own. But the gap between what the hosts said about who scammers target and what regulators now report about who actually loses money is a small, precise illustration of the exact problem the segment was trying to solve. Financial literacy, on the numbers, isn't a subject Gen Z is opting out of. It's one they're scoring the worst on ever recorded, while quietly becoming the age group footing the largest share of the bill when a scam succeeds. Five students spent half an episode trying to close that gap for their own listeners before the data confirmed just how urgent the job actually is.

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