RAG Television

RAG TV brings to your screen the same kind of information, insights and discussions found at RAG conferences. Season 3 of our live weekly interview show with experts from around the world and audience interaction will begin in early 2021; subscribe to our calendar and details of every episode will be automatically added to the diary on your phone or computer. In the meantime, you can watch all previous episodes on demand. Shows are made available for replay soon after they are first broadcast.

• Live Streaming Channel and Audience Interaction
• Season 3 Schedule
• Episode Guide and Recordings of Previous Shows

 

Live Streaming Channel and Audience Interaction

 

Season 3 Schedule

These are the times for the live interview shows on RAG TV so viewers can watch and ask questions in real time. This table will be updated as we schedule guests for Season 3 of RAG TV. Click the link on the end of each row to save the time of that episode to your diary. You can also subscribe to the calendar of all RAG TV shows and every episode will automatically be saved to your schedule. Look below for recordings of episodes that have previously been broadcast.

 

Episode Guide and Recordings of Previous Shows for Playback

Episode	Date of Live Stream	Guests and topics	Link
S3E14	7 Apr 2021	Expert consultant Joseph Nderitu shares his insights into the risks faced by mobile money providers as their services are integrated with a growing number of offerings from other businesses.	replay video
S3E13	31 Mar 2021	Emmy Léger of Araxxe explains how millions of test messages were used to measure A2P SMS bypass fraud worldwide. They discovered many mobile operators receive over 20% of traffic via bypass.	replay video
S3E12	24 Mar 2021	Eric Burger, former CTO of the FCC, talks about the anti-fraud regulations imposed during his tenure and if they will be adopted in other regions.	replay video
S3E11	17 Mar 2021	Brendan Cleary, CEO of Cellusys, explains how criminals intercept messages and invade privacy by exploiting poor security around network signal protocols like SS7 and Diameter.	replay video
S3E10	10 Mar 2021	Jayaprakash Devaraj of Vodafone Qatar and Kerry Evans of BT walk through the process of benchmarking the leakage coverage of real telcos with help from Geoff Ibbett, creator of the RAG Leakage Catalogue.	replay video
S3E9	3 Mar 2021	Pedro Rabacal, CTO of Vodacom Mozambique, and Jeffrey Ross, COO of GBSD Technologies and co-founder of 1Route, talk about the ways that CLI spoofing is exploited by fraudsters worldwide.	replay video
S3E8	24 Feb 2021	Veteran consultant Moly McMillan shares stories from his varied career. After pioneering RA at the beginning of the 00’s he now uses the same principles to help firms in other sectors.	replay video
S3E7	17 Feb 2021	Lawyer, Certified Fraud Examiner and forensic investigator Jacqueline Fick talks to us about the viral nature of fraud and how we need to treat cybercrime like a disease.	replay video
S3E6	10 Feb 2021	Revenue assurance innovator Shahid Ishtiaq explores the impact of 5G on RA and, amongst other topics, why SQL will not support the evolving role of his function.	replay video
S3E5	3 Feb 2021	Bartek Bukowski, Governance and Insights Manager at BT, talks about the challenge of performing a thorough root cause analysis (RCA) and ensuring issues do not recur.	replay video
S3E4	27 Jan 2021	Author and analyst Edward Finegold examines the risks as more of who we are, and what we own, is maintained online.	replay video
S3E3	20 Jan 2021	Nixon Wampamba, General Manager for Revenue Assurance at MTN Nigeria, discusses the reasons why some of the best risk mitigation controls are innovated by African comms providers.	replay video
S3E2	13 Jan 2021	Bill Leahy and Nev Phillips of Symmetry Solutions tell the RAG team how usage data and automated tariff recommendations can be used to generate increased revenue whilst reducing churn and bad debt.	replay video
S3E1	6 Jan 2021	Regular hosts Eric and Lee start the new season with a review of key events during 2020 and the results of the RAG RAFM Survey.	replay video
S2E10	19 Aug 2020	Kathy Romano of Discovery discusses the evolution of business assurance across her work at Verizon and Discovery. Bryan Rowe of Six Degrees explains refiling fraud.	replay video
S2E9	12 Aug 2020	David Smith tells us how the principles of revenue assurance emerged from the audit of British phone meters in the 1990’s, and why those principles remain relevant decades later.	replay video
S2E8	5 Aug 2020	Dario Betti, CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum, talks about A2P SMS fraud. Tony Sani of Orillion demonstrates a video game that teaches players about telecoms risk management.	replay video
S2E7	29 Jul 2020	Ingrid Azzopardi, Internal Auditor at GO, the Maltese operator, talks about sources of risk intelligence and about the impact of COVID-19. Machine learning innovator George Bolt of Neural Technologies explains the current state of the art for fraud detection.	replay video
S2E6	22 Jul 2020	Nikhil Sehgal of Colt talks about the principles of engineering governance, a discipline that maximizes the return on investments in network assets. Steffen Öftring of SIGOS discusses the acquisition of his firm by Mobileum, and the reasons why they sponsored the RAG Learning online education platform.	replay video
S2E5	15 Jul 2020	Francis Afful of MTN Ghana talks about harmonization of tariffs for over 300 million people living in West Africa. Guy Howie of Biaas talks about number range management and how changes to foreign ranges can be exploited by fraudsters.	replay video
S2E4	8 Jul 2020	Taher Talib of Shaw Communciations, Nitin Gangadharan of Subex and Tony Sani of Orillion discuss why telcos like Shaw are using the FMS of vendors like Subex to automatically exchange wangiri intelligence with the blockchain developed by Orillion.	replay video
S2E3	1 Jul 2020	Dion Price of Trustonic talks about device management as part of a strategy for improving collection of revenues; Kingsley Unah contrasts bill accuracy in Africa and North America.	replay video
S2E2	24 Jun 2020	Daniele Cellai of Hewlett Packard Enterprise talks about using various kinds of machine learning as part of automating the way businesses prioritize and respond to suspected frauds.	replay video
S2E1	17 Jun 2020	Donald Reinhart of LATRO Services explains the need for a multi-layered strategy to combat bypass; Timo Vainionpää tells us how a small international carrier can win by offering quality instead of grey routing.	replay video
S1E5	29 Apr 2020	Colin Yates shares insights into the changing patterns of international revenue share fraud (IRSF) and how he helps Europol with their investigations.	replay video
S1E4	22 Apr 2020	Arnd Baranowski, CEO of Oculeus, explains how the adoption of SIP changes the risk exposure of telcos and how fraudulent calls can be identified in less than a tenth of a second.	replay video
S1E3	15 Apr 2020	Joseph Nderitu, former Head of RAFM at Vodacom Tanzania, talks about corruption; Ray Green of Focus Data explains how to conduct a data-driven investigation.	replay video
S1E2	8 Apr 2020	Gina Pesheva of Deutsche Telekom talks about the transition to business assurance; Tony Sani of Orillion talks about using blockchain to fight wangiri fraud.	replay video
S1E1	1 Apr 2020	Jeffrey Ross of GBSD Technologies talks about authenticating caller IDs and the impact that STIR/SHAKEN will have on small telcos worldwide.	replay video
S1E0	25 Mar 2020	Eric Priezkalns of RAG gives a brief preview the first season of RAG Television, explaining how to watch the live shows and ask questions to the guests.	replay video
Pilot	16 Sep 2019	Geoff Ibbett of Symmetry Solutions talks about the RAG Leakage Catalogue, the most comprehensive inventory of telco revenue and cost leakages.	replay video

 

S3E14 – 7 April 2021

Joseph Nderitu draws on his experience as a business advisor to explain how the leading mobile money providers are creating APIs that allow any business to build new offerings like insurance, savings, gambling and rent collection around the ability to access a customer’s mobile money wallet. How should telcos upgrade the skills of staff and enhance their automated controls to further mitigate risk?

Regular presenters Eric and Lee also discuss a new code of conduct that has encouraged Australian telcos to block 11 million wangiri calls and 44 million spoofed calls since December 2020.

 

S3E13 – 31 March 2021

Emmy Léger of Araxxe has deep experience of the business of testing for fraud and billing accuracy. She educated the RAG TV crew about A2P SMS bypass fraud, drawing on the data collated by her business by sending millions of test SMS messages across 106 different countries. The scale of fraud is high on every continent, and was found to be worth over USD500bn globally during 2020.

Regular presenters Eric and Lee also discuss the security of undersea cables and whether governments and the private sector need to do more to safeguard vital infrastructure.

 

S3E12 – 24 March 2021

Eric Burger, Georgetown University Professor and former White House advisor, talks about the anti-fraud regulations imposed during his tenure as CTO of the FCC, and if they will be adopted in other regions. Will other regulators choose to adopt an approach to verifying the origin of calls that depends on a central authority? What are the implications for international traffic and do the current US rules leave room for compromise?

Regular presenters Eric and Lee also discuss a worrying story about SMS hijacking involving a gaping flaw in how data managed by NetNumber is used to determine the routing of SMS messages. SMS is definitely not the 2FA the world needs!

 

S3E11 – 17 March 2021

Brendan Cleary, CEO of Cellusys, has spent his entire career enhancing the security that surrounds network signals protocols like SS7 and Diameter. Brendan explains how vulnerabilities are exploited by criminals and other bad actors to steal money and engage in espionage, and why there are still very many networks that have not hardened security by implementing firewalls.

Regular presenters Eric and Lee also discuss the shocking case of a British telco systematically overcharging hundreds of thousands of customers over a 15 year period whilst still receiving clean audit reports from their billing accuracy auditors.

 

S3E10 – 10 March 2021

Kerry Evans of BT and Jayaprakash Devaraj of Vodafone Qatar walk through the RAG Leakage Coverage Study under the expert supervision of Geoff Ibbett, consultant at Symmetry Solutions and creator of the RAG Leakage Catalogue. They compare their experience of monitoring and measuring all 25 categories of leakage, providing many rapid-fire observations about the challenges they have faced and the controls they have implemented.

 

S3E9 – 3 March 2021

The spoofing of calling line identification (CLI), also known as caller ID, is exploited by fraudsters around the world. Pedro Rabacal, CTO of Vodacom Mozambique, and Jeffrey Ross of GBSD Technologies and 1Route discuss the background, issues and new solutions that are in development.

Presenters Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall also discuss the progress of RAG TV to date and the desire to get back to holding events in the real world!

 

S3E8 – 24 February 2021

Veteran consultant Moly McMillan shares stories from a career which has included leadership of the revenue assurance functions at Skype, Millicom Group and Virgin Media. With experience of an OTT provider, an international group of mobile operators and a multiplay cable company Moly has since gone on to become a business advisor to organizations in other verticals, applying assurance principles in very different areas such as digital currencies, asset management and property technology.

Presenters Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall also discuss a rather brazen attempt to copy the RAG Wangiri Blockchain.

 

S3E7 – 17 February 2021

Lawyer, Certified Fraud Examiner and forensic investigator Jacqueline Fick draws on her experience of telecoms operators and cybercrime to highlight the similarities between the spread of international telecoms fraud and the spread of a virus. Jacqueline also shares her views on the impact of home working on the risk landscape for communications providers.

Presenters Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall discuss how the launch of Elon Musk’s Starlink, and other similar satellite based ISPs, will affect the internet landscape.

 

S3E6 – 10 February 2021

Revenue assurance innovator Shahid Ishtiaq explores the impact of 5G on traditional controls and why SQL could not support the evolving role of his function. His model uses robotic process automation (RPA) to extend the controls paradigm by understanding all of a customer’s interactions with the provider.

Presenters Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall, referencing the overthrow of the government in Myanmar, discuss the working priorities for senior risk leaders in a telco when there is major upheaval like a revolution.

 

S3E5 – 3 February 2021

Bartek Bukowski, Governance and Insights Manager at BT, talks about the challenge of performing a thorough root cause analysis (RCA) and then ensuring issues do not recur. There are plenty of methods that have been developed to pursue RCA, but what sounds good in theory can be difficult to deliver in practice.

Presenters Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall discuss collaboration in the industry with some good and bad examples of how to do it!

 

S3E4 – 27 January 2021

Author and analyst Edward Finegold examines the risks around digital identity, as more of who we are, and what we own, is maintained online. Who is liable when an account is hijacked or an interruption of services affects revenues? Recent events have intensified demands for legal change, but providers already face tough moral decisions.

Our hosts Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall discuss the reporting of SIM swap numbers in the UK press and how the facts seem to break down as you start to dig a little!

 

S3E3 – 20 January 2021

Our guest Nixon Wampamba, General Manager for Revenue Assurance at MTN Nigeria, discusses the reasons why some of the best risk mitigation controls are innovated by African comms providers.

Hosts Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall talk about the implications of the facial recognition laws recently passed in Portland, Oregon, and the broader implications of local privacy laws at internet scale.

 

S3E2 – 13 January 2021

Our guests Bill Leahy and Nev Phillips of Symmetry Solutions join us to discuss Personalised Recommendation and Order (PRO) solutions and why the automated calculation of the best tariff plan according to each customer’s historic usage can increase revenues and reduce complaints.

Hosts Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall also talk about the results of the recent Commsrisk poll of the most/least respected RAFM collaboration organizations and take a look at the management of bad debt by comms providers.

 

S3E1 – 6 January 2021

Regular hosts Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall return for the RAG review of 2020 and with all the news since the end of Season 2. The news topics debated included Covid, industry consolidation and China, robocalls and mobile money. We also discussed the RAG Hall of Fame and the results of the RAG RAFM Survey which showed comms providers and customers are collectively using USD142bn per year to comms fraud and leakage!

 

S2E10 – 19 August 2020

Kathy Romano talks about the progression of revenue assurance during her time at Verizon, and how she now reapplies the same concepts to the pay-per-view content supplied by Discovery. Bryan Rowe of Six Degrees gives a deep dive into the factors that lead to refiling fraud and the various methods used to prevent it.

Hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the finding that 22 percent of data breaches covered by the Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report 2020 were caused by human error, and draw an analogy with the underreporting of revenue leakages.

 

S2E9 – 12 August 2020

David Smith talks about the 2001 publication Successfully Managing Revenue Assurance, written by David in collaboration with Peter Carling and Richard Peachey, and how the revenue assurance principles it defined had emerged from the audit of British phone meters in the 1990’s. David also told us why those principles remain relevant decades later, remembers the development of the first revenue assurance measures and benchmarking, and reveals why his follow-up book about margin management has still not been published, despite requests to make it publicly available.

Hosts Eric and Nixon discuss US plans to curb Chinese surveillance through its ‘Clean Network’ program, and the ethical breakdown that leads some practitioners to claim they are ‘certified’ fraud officers although they gave the certificates to themselves.

 

S2E8 – 5 August 2020

Dario Betti, CEO of the Mobile Ecosystem Forum (MEF), talks about messaging fraud and why his association is updating its A2P SMS Code of Conduct for telcos, aggregators, system providers and enterprises involved in sending A2P SMS messages. MEF’s A2P mobile messaging fraud framework can be found here.

Tony Sani, co-founder of Orillion Solutions, shows us around an exciting new video game that teaches players about the risks faced by telcos, and explains why teaching through play is much more effective than most other forms of staff training. A playable demo of the game can be found here.

Hosts Eric and Lee discuss the ramifications of allowing telcos to use analytics to automatically decide which calls should be blocked, and why low orbit satellites are a threat to the strategies pursued by some telcos.

 

S2E7 – 29 July 2020

Ingrid Azzopardi, who leads the internal audit function at Maltese operator GO, talks about the impact of COVID-19 and why it is vital to educate both customers and employees about fraud.

George Bolt, a scientist and inventor who is the Head of Analytics at Neural Technologies, discusses revenue assurance and fraud management use cases for pattern detection by machine learning.

Hosts Eric and Lee use coronavirus as a way to illustrate key principles in risk management whilst debating whether it will change the telecoms industry forever.

 

S2E6 – 22 July 2020

Nikhil Sehgal talks about his new role overseeing engineering governance for the Technology division of multinational network operator Colt. In this role Nikhil seeks to maximize the value from Colt’s spending on network assets, with the intention that he gains a comprehensive understanding of the use and profitability of every component of their network. During the interview Nikhil contrasts his current assurance and risk management goals with those of his previous position as Head of Business Assurance and Insights.

Steffen Öftring, Director of Revenue Assurance at SIGOS, explains why his firm decided to become the new sponsors of RAG Learning, our online training platform. Steffen also comments on the recent acquisition of SIGOS by Mobileum and the strategy to be adopted by the combined business.

Hosts Eric and Lee also talk about cryptocurrency scammers hacking blue-tick accounts at Twitter and the implications of the highest court in the EU overturning the EU-US Privacy Shield data protection deal, the second time this court has invalidated a personal data privacy agreement between the European Commission and the US government in just five years.

 

S2E5 – 15 July 2020

Francis Afful, Senior RAFM Manager at MTN Ghana, talks about tariff harmonisation across West Africa and how it will lead to the risk of negative margins for telcos. Francis also shares his views on bypass fraud and regulatory audits of telco revenues. Guy Howie of Biaas discusses the reasons why the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has proven unable to track changes to national number plans, and how fraudsters keep finding new ways to exploit loopholes in the way the plans are managed.

Eric and Lee also discuss the impact on Huawei of national security decisions made by the USA and UK, and the acquistion of leading test call firm SIGOS by RAFM market leader Mobileum.

 

S2E4 – 8 July 2020

Taher Talib of Shaw Communciations, Nithin Gangadharan of Subex and Tony Sani of Orillion discuss why telcos like Shaw are using the fraud management systems (FMS) supplied by vendors like Subex to automatically exchange wangiri intelligence with other telcos via a blockchain developed by Orillion.

Co-hosts Eric and Lee also chat about the relatively small proportion of US voice calls being authenticated using STIR/SHAKEN, and they celebrated RAG TV’s streaming channel exceeding 10,000 views since its launch!

 

S2E3 – 1 July 2020

Dion Price, CEO of Trustonic, talks about different ways to control the handset to encourage customers to pay their bills by selectively disconnecting some but not all services they can use. Kingsley Unah, formerly Financial Controller and General Manager for RAFM at Airtel Nigeria, contrasts telco billing accuracy and KYC in Nigeria and his new home, Canada.

Hosts Eric and Lee also talk about the dramatic fight to suspend mobile money services in Zimbabwe amidst government claims of money laundering and systematic ‘printing’ of digital money.

 

S2E2 – 24 June 2020

Daniele Cellai of Hewlett Packard Enterprise talks about case scoring for fraud cases, how this helps businesses to prioritize work and avoid wasting time on false positives, and the various kinds of machine learning that can be used to improve case scoring so decisions on how to respond to frauds can be made automatically.

Regular hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the risk of privacy breaches when participants register for webinars and virtual conferences.

 

S2E1 – 17 June 2020

Timo Vainionpää, owner of AurorA International Telecom, talks about the downsides to least cost routing and the impact that origin-based pricing is having on fraud. Donald Reinhart of LATRO Services explains the factors that encourage bypass and why he advocates responding with a mix of controls including test calls, analytics and interpretation of network signals.

Regular hosts Eric and Lee also discuss racial bias amongst telecoms risk professionals and the reuse of IMEIs.

 

S1E5 – 29 April 2020

Colin Yates is an authority on international telecoms fraud. He pioneered the practice of fraud management first in his home country of New Zealand, then worked with telcos worldwide by contributing to law enforcement bodies and fraud associations whilst leading the anti-fraud and police liaison function of Vodafone Group. Colin shares his insights into the changing patterns of international revenue share fraud, why police forces do not pursue telecoms fraudsters more often, and the accuracy of estimates of fraud losses. Colin also explains why he has been sharing his fraud intelligence with Europol, free of charge.

Regular hosts Eric and Lee also chat about the problems created by the aggressive sales tactics of some RAFM vendors, the lack of innovation in revenue assurance relative to fraud management, and the beginnings of a telecoms cold war between the USA and China.

 

S1E4 – 22 April 2020

Special guest Arnd Baranowski, CEO of Oculeus, speaks about the ways SIP signalling can be exploited to help or hinder telecoms fraudsters. Arnd also discusses the research performed by his business in collaboration with the University of Kassel; this involved using machine learning to review SIP signals so fraudsters are identified and disconnected within the first 100 milliseconds of a call.

Hosts Eric and Lee also talk with Arnd about the FCC decision to make STIR/SHAKEN call authentication mandatory for all IP networks in the USA. STIR/SHAKEN adds a SIP signature which the terminating network can use to confirm the caller ID with a central authority, but depends upon the end-to-end implementation of SIP and STIR/SHAKEN across all the telcos handling the call. One FCC Commissioner stated the adoption of STIR/SHAKEN would cost some telcos “tens of millions” of dollars, begging a question about how many telcos and countries will voluntarily follow the lead of North America by adopting STIR/SHAKEN, and what happens if an increasing number of robocalls terminating on US phones are found to have originated abroad. The team also debated the merits of two alternative ways of authenticating the origin of a call: SEISMIC and the A & B Number Handshake.

 

S1E3 – 15 April 2020

The two guests are Joseph Nderitu, an RAFM consultant who has worked for various telcos around East Africa, and Ray Green, Director of Focus Data Services and a winner of the GSMA’s Outstanding Contribution Award for his efforts to fight fraud.

Joseph recounts the story of when he and four other executives working for Vodacom Tanzania, including the CEO, were detained without bail on trumped-up charges of conspiring to help another business to commit bypass fraud. Joseph also explains how the Tanzanian government habitually imprisons telco managers to force their employers to pay hefty fines for alleged crimes that are never tried in open court. Ray shares his advice on how to use data to conduct an investigation, and he also gives real-life examples that illustrate the need for telcos to exchange intelligence about fraud. Hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the challenges when seeking to manage operational risks with teams that are working from home, and the FCC proposing a USD6mn fine for Tracfone after the American MVNO claimed government subsidies for low-income subscribers who did not really exist.

 

S1E2 – 8 April 2020

The show is joined by two special guests: Gina Pesheva, Senior Manager for Business Assurance and Billing at Deutsche Telekom and Tony Sani, founder of Orillion Solutions. Gina talks about the reasons her team created an animated video to explain the transition from revenue assurance to business assurance; click here to find Gina’s video on YouTube. Tony speaks about his business partnering with RAG to deliver the RAG Wangiri Blockchain, used by a consortium of telcos to exchange intelligence about wangiri fraud. Hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the destruction of 5G masts by believers of fake news spread using WhatsApp and social media, and the FCC threatening to block all traffic from international gateway telcos if they continue to connect coronavirus scam robocalls to the US network.

 

S1E1 – 1 April 2020

Special guest Jeffrey Ross, COO of GBSD Technologies, talks about STIR/SHAKEN, the framework for validating the originating number of voice calls, and how it can still be cost-effectively adapted to suit the circumstances of non-IP networks and smaller telcos. Hosts Eric and Lee also discuss the Tanzanian government arresting telecoms executives and the ways spammers are exploiting the coronavirus pandemic.

 

S1E0 – 25 March 2020

Eric Priezkalns previews the first season of RAG Television, with guests lined up for each Wednesday of April.

 

Pilot – 16 September 2019

Eric Priezkalns and Lee Scargall discussed topical matters including: national revenue assurance audits and the dispute between GVG and the state of Guinea; mobile ad fraud in the USA; and academic research into turning internet pirates into paying customers. Special guest Geoff Ibbett also joined the show, talking about the responses already received to the RAG Leakage Coverage Survey.