Why people flex money online: what surveys, economists and scammers tell us

Seven polls from 2019 to 2024, four classic experiments and three warnings from regulators, read together to explain why showing off wealth online is so common and what it costs.

Published: 16 October 2026 · Last reviewed: 1 November 2026

A room full of strangers who know nothing about you

Picture walking into a hall where everyone is a stranger, and you may say one thing about yourself before the doors close. You would not mention your patience or your sense of humor. You would pick whatever is easiest to see and hardest to doubt: a car, a trip, a figure. That hall is a social feed, and it explains most of what follows. When all an audience has is a post, the post has to carry your whole reputation.

Researchers keep arriving at the same four pulls. Signaling: wealth earns respect only if someone sees it. Comparison: a feed lines up people who seem to be doing better. Pressure: the circle you are expected to keep up with now includes everyone you follow. Self-image: status bought for the crowd also quiets doubts about oneself.

Below, the polls come first, grouped by what they measured rather than by publisher. Then come the experiments behind each pull, the price people pay, and a short note for anyone who needs a wallet screen on camera. For the vocabulary and its history, flex culture from Veblen to crypto is the companion read, and the profit card is the typical crypto version of the habit.

Seven polls, read side by side

Statistics on flexing travel without their origin. The list below keeps only those traced to the pollster's own publication, with the field dates and the number of respondents. Anything that could not be traced was dropped.

1. Schwab, February 2019. A survey by Logica Research of 1,000 Americans aged 21 to 75, plus 200 members of Gen Z. Thirty-five percent had spent beyond their means to take part in experiences with friends, rising to 48% of millennials and 41% of Gen Z. Sixty percent wondered how their friends paid for the experiences they posted (Charles Schwab, Modern Wealth Survey).
2. Credit Karma, 2019. Qualtrics polled 1,041 U.S. consumers. Among millennials, 48% had gone into debt to keep up with friends, against 39% in the previous year's edition (Credit Karma).
3. Bankrate, June 2022. YouGov questioned 2,664 adults, of whom 2,246 used social media. Close to half of Gen Z users (47%) and of millennial users (46%) felt worse about their money after browsing other people's posts. Among posters, 46% of Gen Z and 38% of millennials owned up to posting things to seem successful (Bankrate).
4. LendingTree, July 2022. Qualtrics reached 1,577 U.S. consumers aged 18 to 76. Thirty-nine percent had overspent to impress someone, among them 52% of Gen Z and 46% of millennials, and 63% of those spenders ended up in debt (LendingTree).
5. Bankrate, August 2023. YouGov again, with 3,607 adults and 3,304 social media users. Fifty-seven percent thought people sometimes post to look more successful, while 12% admitted to it themselves (Bankrate).
6. Credit Karma, December 2023. Qualtrics asked 1,006 adults. Twenty-nine percent reported what the company calls money dysmorphia, a warped picture of one's own finances: 43% of Gen Z and 41% of millennials. Roughly 44% of Gen Z and 46% of millennials said they were obsessed with becoming rich (Credit Karma).
7. LendingTree, February 2024. QuestionPro reached 1,964 consumers aged 18 to 78. Thirty-two percent felt pushed to spend to keep pace with others, 51% had overspent to impress, and 56% of those had been in debt as a result (LendingTree).

Three patterns that repeat

• Everyone points at everyone else. Sixty-two percent of users in 2022 believed the accounts they follow post to look successful, yet about one poster in four admitted it. In 2023 the contrast was 57% against 12%. Either people understate their own habits, or a small group of accounts does most of the showing off.
• Showing off and overspending go together. More than half of the 2024 LendingTree sample had overspent to impress, and most of those people had carried debt because of it.
• The watchers lose too. In 2022, nearly half of young users felt worse about their finances after scrolling. In 2023, one user in five said the same, and 30% among Gen Z and millennials.

Why Gen Z stands out in every table

The age curve in LendingTree's 2024 data is hard to miss. Pressure to keep up was felt by 62% of Gen Z, 44% of millennials, 25% of Gen X and 8% of baby boomers. Seventy-two percent of Gen Z had overspent to impress, against 30% of boomers. Bankrate's 2022 poll shows the same gap in posting: 46% of Gen Z posters admitted staging success, against 9% of boomer posters.

Do not read this as a trait of a generation. A poll taken once cannot tell youth from cohort. LendingTree's 2022 edition found that 45% of boomers felt less pressure with age, and the 2024 edition found 57% of Gen Z feeling more of it. Part of the distance may close on its own.

One figure does point to intent. In 2022, 22% of Gen Z posters said they hoped their posts conveyed wealth or success, compared with 3% of boomer posters. For many young users, projecting success is not a side effect of a post. It is the point.

Four experiments, one for each pull

Signaling: Veblen and Spence

In 1899, Thorstein Veblen argued in The Theory of the Leisure Class that holding riches earns nothing until others can see them. Modern cities, he noted, fill with onlookers who never learn anything else about you, so a display readable at a glance is the only message that reaches them. A feed is that crowd in its purest form.

Michael Spence supplied the logic in 1973. In "Job Market Signaling", a signal sorts people only when it costs more for those lacking the quality being advertised, and he named status shown through conspicuous consumption as a case the framework could cover (Quarterly Journal of Economics). Apply it online and the result is a spiral. Anyone can post a rented car or a doctored screenshot, so these signals sort nobody, flexes grow louder, and viewers grow more doubtful at the same moment.

Comparison: Festinger and the upward glance

Leon Festinger proposed in 1954 that people judge themselves by looking at others. A feed built from everyone's best days turns most of those glances upward. Bankrate's 2022 poll found social media users more likely to feel bad about their finances (34%) than about anything else, appearance included (32%). Credit Karma's 2023 poll found 48% of Gen Z and 59% of millennials feeling behind financially.

Pressure: what a lottery reveals about neighbors

Sumit Agarwal, Vyacheslav Mikhed and Barry Scholnick examined Canadian lottery winners. The larger a household's win, the more the households nearby borrowed and the more of them later declared bankruptcy. Those bankrupt neighbors held more visible assets, such as houses and cars, and no more of the hidden kind, such as furniture. Pressure follows what can be seen, and a feed exists to show things.

Self-image: the platinum card

Leonardo Bursztyn and his co-authors ran a field experiment with an Indonesian bank. Demand for a platinum card far exceeded demand for a plain card with identical benefits, and the platinum card was used more in social situations. When participants' self-esteem was lifted, the appetite for the status card fell. The authors read this as social image standing in for self-image, which fits Credit Karma's finding that some 44% of Gen Z and 46% of millennials called themselves obsessed with being rich.

Why it often misfires

Stephen Garcia, Kimberlee Weaver and Patricia Chen compared what showy people expect with what observers feel. On an upscale shopping street, 65.6% of shoppers believed that arriving in a luxury car would help them make new friends. Observers sizing up a newcomer, however, were less interested in the luxury driver than in the one with a basic car, and watches and branded T-shirts gave the same pattern. In a work setting, the effect faded and tilted the other way, because status looked like competence.

Pretending to be rich: the cheap version of the signal

If a flex works because it costs something, a fake flex collects the respect without the bill, until someone checks. The polls suggest the motive is ordinary. For Gen Z and millennials in LendingTree's 2022 poll, feeling successful was the leading reason for overspending to impress, and in 2024 it was given by 29% of all overspenders.

Faking sits on a ladder. The lowest rung is borrowed props: a friend's car, a hotel lobby, a rented watch. Higher up come staged scenes, and the top rung is a made-up figure, such as a balance typed into a field. Crypto even has a word for the top rung, larping rich, and a set of giveaways in how to spot a composed wallet screenshot.

Some do it to be admired. Others do it because the display is a sales pitch, and that is where the habit stops being harmless.

The bill: debt, scams and a target on your back

Debt

The polls agree. Credit Karma's 2019 poll had 48% of millennials in debt to keep up with friends. Among LendingTree respondents who overspent to impress, 63% went into debt in 2022 and 56% in 2024. The lottery research goes where a poll cannot: bigger wins next door led to more bankruptcies on the street.

Scams that borrow the look

Regulators describe the flex as bait. In October 2023 the Federal Trade Commission reported that investment scams accounted for over half of the money lost to social media fraud in the first half of that year, with scammers who "promote their own supposed investment success" before steering victims to fake platforms, typically paid in crypto. In 2022 it had described romance scammers who "dazzle people with their supposed wealth and sophistication", then offer crypto tips.

In December 2022 the SEC charged eight influencers over a stock manipulation scheme it valued at $100 million. Per the SEC, seven of them presented themselves as successful traders, gathered audiences of hundreds of thousands on Twitter and Discord, and sold the stocks they were recommending without saying so. These are allegations, yet the sequence they describe, show success, gather a crowd, cash out, is worth knowing by heart.

The defense is the same each time: a display is not a track record. A profit card shows a single position (what a PnL card leaves out), and a wallet screenshot shows an interface. Only a public address you can look up on a block explorer tells you what is actually held.

Being singled out

This cost falls on those whose wealth is real. Chainalysis reported in July 2025 that physical wrench attacks on crypto holders were heading for roughly double the previous record year, and tracked them against the bitcoin price. It stressed that such attacks stay comparatively rare, and its advice to holders includes skipping posts that reveal holdings or trading activity (Chainalysis, 2025).

If you need a wallet on screen

A screenshot of a real wallet can reveal an address, a balance and, from the post itself, a date. An address is public by design, so anyone holding it can read the whole history on a block explorer. Put it next to your name and that history becomes yours. Blurring seldom cuts the link, since the mix of tokens and the exact amounts are often enough to identify an account (what a wallet screenshot exposes).

When a wallet is only a prop, in a sketch, an explainer or an edit, nothing real needs to stand behind it. Flexdger Wallet, our own product, is a mockup of a crypto wallet app in the browser: you type the amounts, it holds no funds, and no address of it can receive anything. Keep a visible "Mockup" label on screen, and remember that showing such a screen as a real balance or as proof of funds breaks our terms of use. A composed screen is a costume, and it cannot answer the question this page started with.

Where the figures come from

• Bankrate, 2022 poll on negative feelings after seeing others' posts, and 2023 poll on impulse buying through social media.
• LendingTree, 2022 poll on overspending to impress and 2024 poll on keeping up with the Joneses.
• Charles Schwab, Modern Wealth Survey 2019, and two Credit Karma polls, 2019 on FOMO debt and 2023 on money dysmorphia.
• Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), and Bursztyn and co-authors on platinum credit cards (NBER, 2018).
• Garcia, Weaver and Chen on the status signals paradox (2018), and Agarwal, Mikhed and Scholnick on peers' income and distress (Philadelphia Fed, 2018).
• Federal Trade Commission data spotlight on social media scams (2023).