Mike Piper: Scammers Are Getting Smarter. Is Your Financial Security Keeping Up?

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Christine Benz (0:36)

Hi, and welcome to The Long View. I'm Christine Benz, Director of Personal Finance and Retirement Planning for Morningstar.

Amy Arnott (0:42)

And I'm Amy Arnott, Portfolio Strategist with Morningstar.

Christine Benz (0:45)

Our guest on the podcast today is Mike Piper. Mike is the author of several personal finance books, the latest of which is called Household Cybersecurity, a CPA's guide to protecting your accounts and personal information. Mike also writes a wonderful blog called Oblivious Investor, and he's developed a free tool exploring social security claiming decisions called Open Social Security.

So Amy, one thing I loved about the conversation with Mike and about Mike's book is his attention to the interplay between cyber crimes and cognitive decline as we age. He has a lot of helpful tips for troubleshooting that issue.

Amy Arnott (1:25)

Yeah, I thought one of the really interesting points he made was that financial problems can be actually an early warning sign of cognitive decline for an older parent or other family member. I was taking a bunch of notes for my to-do list while we were recording, and I thought one helpful idea was when he was talking about why you should create a guest network that's separate from your main network at home and how that can improve your cyber security.

Christine Benz (1:57)

Yeah, there were a lot of simple, helpful tips that are easy to implement. Let's get into the conversation.

Mike, welcome back to The Long View.

Mike Piper (2:09)

Thank you for having me. It's great to be back.

Christine Benz (2:11)

Well, it's great to have you. And I loved the book. I think it's the right book at the right time by the right person because this is a complicated topic.

And we're looking forward to delving into it with you today. Let's start with a really basic question. How do you define a cybercrime?

Mike Piper (2:29)

That's a great question. So the word cybercrime, the only time I use it in my book is referring to some statistics from the FBI about increases in cybercrime. What's kind of funny to me is that in their reports, they don't actually define it themselves.

They give examples. And so it's pretty much what you would expect. It's a lot of efficient crimes, crimes where malware was a part of it, ransomware and things like that. You know, it doesn't include someone pointing a gun at you and saying, give me your wallet, but it includes all of the kind of electronic versions of that crime.

Amy Arnott (3:00)

In the book, you note that there was actually a ten-fold increase in cybercrime between 2018 and 2025 What were some of the main factors behind that huge increase?

Yeah.

Mike Piper (3:11)

So this is for victims aged 60 and up. And the number, it's actually, it's an 11.9 times increase from 2018 to 2025, which is absolutely mind-blowing. And there's a lot of reasons for that. Number one, of course, is just an aging population. You know, as we age, various changes can happen that can make us more vulnerable, whether those are cognitive changes or life circumstances changes. Another big part of it is that just in the last handful of years, the tools that the bad guys have, essentially, have become much stronger as AI capabilities have improved dramatically.

And while that's happening, while their tools are becoming much stronger, the truth is that most individuals, especially older individuals, their own security practices aren't really any different than they were a handful of years ago. So when you have one side getting a lot more powerful and the other side basically continuing to do the same thing, there's been a big shift in the balance of power, essentially.

Christine Benz (4:19)

So we want to delve into aging and cognitive decline as a dimension of this. We'll cover that later. But let's stick with AI for a moment, Mike, because you note that the increasing sophistication of AI is a big factor here. So what types of AI-related scams and frauds have you been seeing and you're most concerned about?