As we learned to spot online and telephone swindlers, the scammers are upping their game.

I'm David Brancaccio. First, the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged yesterday.

No surprise there.

At his briefing, Chair Jerome Powell said it is unlikely the Fed will have to raise interest

rates to fight persistent inflation, but he didn't exactly take a rate hike off the table.

Diane Swank, as chief economist at the audit tax and advisory firm KPMG.

It's not impossible, and in fact it is a real possibility what the Fed chair made clear

was that the threshold to raise rates was higher than the threshold to cut but let's face

it right now the Fed feels pretty stuck where it's the just hold rates higher and have the lags of earlier rate hikes cool the economy, although right

now that doesn't look like it's happening.

At the same time, and also a key part of this this story the job market and general economic activity are zipping along

Checking markets the daui is up 125 points 3 tens percent the sMP is up four 4.10 percent I see the NASDAQ in early

trading here up six tenth percent the ten year benchmark interest rate up 4.64

percent a new report from the FBI's internet crime complaint center shows people 60 and older lost 3.4 billion dollars to fraudsters and scammers last year that's up 11% in a year with the average loss per victim

$34,000. Online crooks are getting more sophisticated in their scheming, for

instance getting their marks to make escalating payments for what they think is

an investment in cryptocurrency before the rug gets pulled out.

Some of these numbers are driven by a new scam called the pig butchering scam and it combines

romance scams along with investment scams so they lose at the end not only that they've invested, but also this potential relationship.

It's Marty De Lima, an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota who studies elder financial exploitation and

while anyone can be a victim she says there are factors that can make older

people more susceptible.

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