Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has brought remarkable advances to everyday life, but unfortunately, it has also supercharged the tools available to criminals.

For investors and families, this new reality comes with new risks and new responsibilities. According to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, reported fraud losses exceeded $16 billion in 2024, a record figure. AI is lowering the cost of deception, making it easier for fraudsters to mimic voices, fabricate documents and create convincing websites.

High-net-worth and mass affluent households are prime targets. The reason is simple: the higher the assets, the bigger the potential payday for criminals. But it is not just multimillionaires who need to pay attention. Retirees with steady wealth, trustees managing family accounts and adult children helping aging parents are all on the radar. Complex finances, multiple accounts, and busy lives can make it easier for fraudsters to take advantage.

AI-enabled fraudsters in action

Real-world cases illustrate just how brazen these schemes can be. In one instance, criminals used a deepfake video call to trick a corporate team into wiring $25 million. Regulatory bodies like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) have also issued warnings about fake investment pitches that boast of AI-powered strategies and fabricated results. The Internal Revenue Service has warned taxpayers of convincing fake tax-preparer sites designed to look identical to IRS.gov. And in the world of crypto and speculative investments, AI-generated promises of “can’t lose” returns fueled nearly $9.3 billion in fraud losses in 2023.

What unites these scams are the red flags. Urgency is one of the biggest ones: scammers insist you act immediately or face severe consequences. Another is false authority: someone claiming to be from the IRS, your bank, or your financial adviser. Today, those cues are more dangerous because AI can fake official voices, titles and video feeds. Secrecy is another warning sign: requests framed as “confidential” or “just between us.” Finally, unusual payment methods like gift cards, cryptocurrency transfers or sudden changes in wiring instructions are classic indicators of fraud.

Practice good cyber hygiene

The good news is that protecting yourself doesn’t require advanced technology, just disciplined habits.

Experts recommend five simple steps.

• First, slow down. Fraudsters rely on speed and panic; taking a breath often prevents mistakes.

• Second, verify through known channels before acting. That means calling a bank, adviser or family member back on a number you know or can verify, not one provided in a suspicious message. Families might even agree on a phishing “safe word” that must be used in any urgent request.

• Third, strengthen your logins. Long, unique passwords, password managers and multi-factor authentication with passkeys or security keys make it much harder for criminals to break into accounts.

• Fourth, freeze your credit. A freeze, or at a minimum a fraud alert, blocks criminals from opening new loans or credit cards in your name.

• Fifth, always use official channels. Go directly to IRS.gov, your adviser’s verified email or your bank’s secure site. Many institutions now offer account alerts for logins, new payees or wire transfers, which can help you catch suspicious activity early.

Act quickly if attacked

If you do fall victim, speed matters. Contact your bank, adviser or credit card company right away. Report the crime to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the Federal Trade Commission. Above all, tell your family and adviser, do not hide it out of embarrassment. The faster you act, the better the chances of containing losses and even recovering funds.

AI is making persuasion easier and cheaper for criminals to achieve scale. But the counterbalance is process and authentication. AI can fake a voice or a video, but it cannot fake a callback on a known number. Building verification into your daily financial routine is your best defense.

AI is powerful, but awareness and process can keep your wealth safe. If something feels off, it probably is. Stop, verify, and ask. By taking just one or two concrete steps today (e.g., freezing your credit, setting up account alerts or talking with your family about red flags) you can make it much harder for criminals to succeed.

The age of AI has arrived for better and in some cases for worse. For those managing assets, the challenge is not to fear technology but to stay a step ahead. By pairing vigilance with practical habits, families can protect their financial security in an increasingly digital world.

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The opinions voiced in this material are for general information only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual.

Bruce Helmer and Peg Webb are financial advisers at Wealth Enhancement Group and co-hosts of “Your Money” on WCCO 830 AM on Sunday mornings. Email Bruce and Peg at yourmoney@wealthenhancement.com. Advisory services offered through Wealth Enhancement Advisory Services LLC, a registered investment adviser and affiliate of Wealth Enhancement Group.

 

Amy Lindgren

Second Sunday Series  — This is the second of 12 columns on career planning post-60, which will appear the second Sunday of each month from September through August.

Welcome back to this year’s Second Sunday series, featuring monthly columns on career planning and job search strategies for workers in that awkward tween stage — you know, that gap from 60 to 100 when we just don’t know what to do with ourselves.

One thing people in this age group are doing with more frequency is working. Maybe not for 40 years, but possibly into their 70s and 80s. Although job search at this age can be intimidating, there are some secrets for success, including this one: limiting your criteria will open more job options.

To explain, here’s a true story: Last year I spoke with a 70-something individual who had been seeking part-time work for several years. Since she had viable skills, this seemed like an indicator of something bad — perhaps a very difficult job market, or age bias.

But further conversation revealed a situation that was almost certainly complicating the search. She had several criteria for the next job, including a flexible part-time schedule, a location within walking distance from home, and an annual three-month snowbird break.

It’s not that her criteria were unreasonable or unachievable. Any of the three might have been acceptable to a variety of employers. But the three combined were a lot to ask.

The lesson? Fewer criteria is better. To apply this lesson, consider which of your criteria are non-negotiable. For example, one of my senior worker clients needed an hour each morning for yoga and stretching, due to her fibromyalgia. She literally couldn’t drive to work otherwise. Her non-negotiable was starting any job before 9 because she needed to maintain her morning routine.

I don’t judge what someone considers non-negotiable, but sometimes I see things that might be better described as “nice to have.” One that frequently catches my attention is meaning, or purpose. As in, “I want a job that’s meaningful.”

If that resonates with you, you’ll want to define the concept before you launch your search, so you’ll know what you’re looking for. Meaningful to whom? How is that measured? Which other criteria can you give up in order to have this one?

Perhaps I should note that I don’t love meaning and purpose as drivers for career planning and job search. I’ll admit, I’ve seen purpose become a powerful motivator for workers to define their goals and better target their job search. For example, someone who feels directed toward teaching can use the epiphany to ditch their first career and retool to be an educator.

That said, workers can also lose precious months and even years while searching for their purpose or calling. For seniors, whose “freshness date” could easily lapse while seeking meaningful work, closing the gap between jobs is especially important. I’d rather see them take whatever job fits their other criteria and then revisit the idea of purpose while earning a paycheck.

This is ornery, but I also feel as if the search for purpose has become something of an industry, targeting affluent seniors. More ornery yet, I’ll note that the whole concept feels a bit patronizing to me, and like a burden placed onto the backs of older workers by societal expectations.

In the end, I’m left asking why we expect someone in their 70s to “work for a purpose” when younger workers are allowed to follow their ambitions. Can’t Grandma work just because she wants to, or at the job that pays the most? Does her work need to somehow give back to society?

All that said, I can’t deny that defining meaning and finding purposeful work are intensely important to some individuals, particularly in their senior years. If that’s the case with you, now is the time scratch this itch. These resources might help on this leg of your journey.

Books: “The Power of Purpose,” by Richard Leider, any edition; “Encore,” by Marc Freedman; “The Three Boxes of Life”, by Richard Bolles.

If a class or cohort session is more your style, several options come up in a browser search. For example, the University of Minnesota’s Midlife Academy offers 8-part sessions online and in-person (www.ccaps.umn.edu/midlife-academy).

Purpose and meaning, schedule, job duties and title, income … whatever your criteria, you’ll want to organize the list and decide which are most important. You may not need to compromise, but remember that having fewer non-negotiables will create space for more opportunities.

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Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

The five candidates for mayor of St. Paul might very well have winnowed themselves down to three this past week during a candidate forum at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church on Snelling Avenue in Highland Park. The candidates were asked where they stood on the proposed bicycle trail along Summit Avenue. Three had the right response.

Two flunked.

The incumbent, Melvin Carter, seeking a third term, said he was fully on board with not only the bicycle trail, but that he was in favor of a complete reconstruction of Summit Avenue — above and below ground — once again pointing out that Summit has not received significant attention since the William Howard Taft administration. Taft was president from 1909 to 1913 and it might be argued that he certainly championed automobiles. Not many bicycles were built for guys who weighed 340 pounds.

Carter also believes cars cost too much and apparently bicycles are essential to the city’s future. You’ve served two terms, Mayor. You flunk.

A candidate named Adam Dullinger also flunked. Dullinger even lamented that he had to drive a car to the forum because Snelling is unsafe for cyclists. Dullinger, an engineer, was passionate about building the bike lanes on Summit, passionate about building bike infrastructure everywhere.

Unfortunately, all the absurd bicycle talk in this town tells us exactly where we are, adrift. Bicycles ignore the real tangible problems that afflict us. Bikes are fun and good exercise. Some people can use them to commute. Great. But if you listed the 100 most pressing needs of this city, accommodating bicycles would come in at 101. Mom isn’t taking her kids to the store on a bicycle in July, much less January. Name one American city in decline that rescued its commerce, stabilized housing, filled downtown buildings and mitigated crime because every family had a Schwinn in the garage. You can’t.

Let’s revisit bicycle paths after we fix this town and can afford such non-essential luxury, speaking of which that Summit Avenue trail is brought to you by unelected bureaucrats spending your money, more of which will be taken by another property-tax increase.

That brings us to the three candidates who didn’t necessarily flunk, some of whom even flirted with adulthood. State Rep. Kaohly Her said she wasn’t ready to abandon the project, but was skeptical.

“The question (Summit bike trail) being asked is flawed because you’re asking me to make a decision on planning from a group of people who handled it very poorly,” Her said. She then played the rich man, poor man game by wondering if the money couldn’t be better used serving the needs of Black and brown people, but she vowed to reevaluate the proposal. Here’s a bulletin, Her: we all drive on lousy streets, all of us.

Yan Chen, a biophysicist, said of the Summit bike trail, “it’s the wrong priority for the wrong time.” She called for the city to refocus spending on core needs. She sounded like somebody who knows what the problems really are and they aren’t bicycles.

Mike Hilborn, who owns a power washing and snow plowing company, believes, like Chen, that a bike trail on Summit is a non-starter. Hilborn said if a street needs work, it’s Grand Avenue, not Summit, and that Summit Avenue already has bike lanes in both directions.

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“If we have a tax problem, a crime problem and a homelessness problem,” Hilborn said, “I don’t think we need to try to fix something where we already have a bike lane.”

There were certainly other questions asked of the candidates, but questions about bicycles are revealing. St. Paul needs an infusion of care and concern for all the taxpayers so the people trying to raise families in St. Paul have a city they can count on in the future. I don’t know a single soul in this town pinning their hopes for a flight of the phoenix on bicycles. Our concerns are more serious than bicycles.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

When Democrats are at their best, they are performing one job: reducing inequality and making American life more just. That’s what Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal and Lyndon Johnson tried to do with the war on poverty. That’s what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama did with their education reform policies. Both Clinton and Obama ran as education outsiders and change agents. In between those presidencies, Democrats worked with George W. Bush on the No Child Left Behind Act, which passed with a majority of 384-45 in the House and 91-8 in the Senate. No Child Left Behind was all about bringing accountability to America’s schools.

Because of those reform efforts, student achievement test scores in reading, math and most other academic subjects shot upward between the mid-1990s and about 2013. In 1990, 48% of America’s eighth graders scored below basic competency in math. But by 2013 that was down to just 26%. The best part of this progress was that the scores of the most disadvantaged students shot up the most. Among Black students, the share of those scoring below basic in math fell from 78% to 48%. Among Hispanic students, it fell from 66% to 38%.

Student outcomes are rarely just about what happens in the schools. The policies of that so-called neoliberal era helped, too. Economic growth was strong; income inequality decreased. Between 1983 and 2010, the child poverty rate fell from 30% to about 17%.

Then came the financial crisis in 2008. States and families had less to spend on education. That slowed the increase in student achievement scores, but it did not stop it. The turnaround came in about 2013. Ever since then, American student achievement scores have been falling. Scores for students at the top end of the performance distribution are merely stagnant. But the scores of students from less privileged backgrounds are collapsing. Outcomes are becoming more and more unequal, and the life opportunities for American young people are becoming more unequal, too.

What happened around 2013?

Two things.

Screens

The first was screens. If you use screens to read articles and books, you are building mental muscles, but if you use screens to passively consume short videos, you’re basically committing intellectual suicide.

The share of American 18-year-olds who say they have difficulty thinking or concentrating has been rising since around 2013. The share of adults who lack basic literacy and numeracy skills is surging. IQ scores, which had been rising for a century, are falling in all but one category of the tests.

Smartphones are a global phenomenon, and sure enough, student achievement scores and general reasoning abilities are declining in many nations around the world. But we shouldn’t be fatalistic about phones. They clearly impede intellectual attainment, but what really matters is what individuals, families, schools and nations do in response to them. And in this regard, U.S. performance is particularly terrible.

As Nat Malkus of the American Enterprise Institute has demonstrated, the achievement gap in the United States for science and math is growing far faster “than in any country with comparable data.” We have done almost nothing to protect our most vulnerable people from the scourge of the screens.

The collapsing center

That’s in part because of the second thing that happened around 2013: The American political center collapsed. Populist Republicans replaced Bush-style Republicans. The populists didn’t like the way No Child Left Behind centralized power. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party shifted left. Progressive Democrats never liked the accountability regime in the first place, and since then, progressives have marginalized the moderate education reformers.

In 2015, Congress replaced No Child Left Behind with the Every Student Succeeds Act. The age of accountability was over; the age of equity was here. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, states no longer had to produce rigorous report cards on how schools were doing. Most Democratic states watered down the accountability mechanisms. For example, California revised its rating system, and magically, nearly 80% of its schools were ranked as medium- or high-performing.

George W. Bush had earlier warned of the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” but in the age of equity, schools moved to ease rigor and standards for poorer kids. Many schools stopped assigning whole books and started assigning short passages. What education writer Tim Daly calls the education depression had begun.

Some people blame the COVID-19 pandemic for our catastrophically declining test scores. But the educational depression started before COVID and was only magnified by it. James H. Wyckoff of the University of Virginia estimates that about 47% of the decline in eighth grade math scores since the pandemic were “predicted” by trends that were already in place before the coronavirus hit.

You probably saw stories on the recent National Assessment of Educational Progress Report. The average 12th-grade reading scores are now lower than at any time since these reports began publishing 33 years ago. Once again, top performers merely stagnated, but scores from the lowest performers fell through the floor.

A few paragraphs ago I mentioned that during the accountability era, the number of Black students scoring below basic levels in math had fallen from 78% to 48%. Well, now that number is back up to 62%. My own conclusion is this: The equity approach is supposed to increase, well, equity. But by lowering accountability, rigor and standards, it produces more inequality.

So, reform? Only Republicans are at it

We’ve now had 12 years of terrible education statistics. You would have thought this would spark a flurry of reform activity. And it has, but in only one type of people: Republicans. When it comes to education policy, Republicans are now kicking Democrats in the butt.

Schools in blue states such as California, Oregon and Washington are languishing, but schools in red states including Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Louisiana, traditional laggards, are suddenly doing remarkably well. Roughly 52% of Mississippi’s Black fourth graders read at grade level, compared with only 28% in California. Louisiana is the only state where fourth grade achievement levels have returned to prepandemic levels. An Urban Institute study adjusted for the demographics of the student bodies found that schools in Mississippi are educating their fourth graders more successfully in math and reading than schools in any other state. Other rising stars include Florida, Texas and Georgia.

Writing in Education Next, scholars Michael Hartney and Paul E. Peterson report on an interesting turnaround. In 2019 deep blue states tended to have higher average reading scores for fourth graders than deep red states after adjusting for demographics. By 2024 that had flipped: “Red states rank highest, blue states lowest.”

The so-called Southern Surge came about because the red states built a reading curriculum based on science, not ideology. The schools provide clear accountability information to parents and give them more freedom to choose schools. They send coaches to low-performing classrooms. They use high-quality tutoring, and they don’t promote students who can’t read, reducing the bureaucratic strings that used to control behavior in the classroom. They also hold schools and parents accountable. In Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee, a child who isn’t reading at the end of third grade has to repeat it.

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Where the hell are the Democrats? One gets the impression that many of them have spent the last decade deciding that social justice ideology is more important than reducing inequality. What was Joe Biden’s big K-12 education idea? Zippo. In 2024 there was nothing but a howling void where Kamala Harris’ education agenda should have been.

Some bright spots

Fortunately, there are some bright spots.

A few days ago I was scrolling through my phone (yes, I have my own addictions) when I came across an astonishing video. Rahm Emanuel was speaking in Iowa and was asked about school reform. He proceeded to rip through a series of ambitious and credible ideas: Return K-8 to the fundamentals, like phonics, the way Mississippi is doing. Completely reinvent high schools, which haven’t changed in a century. Put a special focus on keeping freshmen on track, because once they are juniors it’s too expensive to try to get them on a better course. Create incentives for students who earn a B average to get books and transportation for free. Bring college into high school with dual credit programs so students can gain confidence and do advanced work. Make high school degrees contingent on students having a letter of acceptance from a college, the armed forces or a vocational training program so they have a plan for the day after.

In this video, I saw an impressive and even inspiring Democratic approach to improving student outcomes.

We can’t live in a country in which the party that dominates the rural areas has a proven educational agenda while the party that dominates the urban areas doesn’t. The Democrats lost part of their soul when they lost touch with the working class; they’ll lose whatever is left of it if they can’t be a party that champions equal opportunity. We can’t live in a country that is rapidly losing its basic intellectual abilities, where those who are least privileged get hammered the most.

David Brooks writes a column for the New York Times.