Don’t Mess with Grandma: The Next Fight in Cybersecurity

Don’t Mess with Grandma: The Next Fight in Cybersecurity by Jeremy Rasmussen Elder Financial Exploitation (EFE) is a $35 billion a year heist hiding in plain sight. It’s the quiet crime that steals retirement dreams, rewrites family legacies, and preys on the people who built the world we now secure. And the worst part? Most of it never even gets reported. Hollywood has started to take notice—"The Beekeeper" as an example—but the real story is far uglier. Industrialized scam compounds overseas. Seniors so isolated they cling to scammers for companionship. Families betraying their own. It's exploitation wrapped in loneliness, coercion, and heartbreak. This keynote shows just how easy it is to fool “grandma” with AI generated voices and faces. If we can clone a loved one in seconds, imagine what a motivated criminal can do. Education and awareness alone won’t cut it anymore. So, I’m bringing the BSides Tampa community a challenge: think bigger. Think weirder. Think bolder. I’ll tease a few unconventional ideas—personal scale monitoring, AI that wastes scammers’ time, safer digital spaces for seniors—but the real innovation will come from our community. EFE isn’t just a cybersecurity problem. It’s a societal failure. And if anyone can flip the script on the fraudsters, it’s us.