What is lying in wait for telecoms in 2021?

 

Observers and practitioners take it on the chin to predict what the telecoms industry may look like in the coming year.

A piece of witticism goes something like this:  It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. There are slightly different ways to put across the idea, which has been variably attributed to Niels Bohr, Yogi Berra, Piet Hein, Mark Twain, Samuel Goldwyn, Robert Storm Petersen, the Buddha, and Nostradamus. It is such a truism that there is plenty of truth in it, as those of us who have been involved in looking into a crystal ball, or a blank spreadsheet, can all relate to.

Presumably, though, some predictions are more difficult than others. For example, it is more likely that we get long-term trends more correct than short-term forecasts. John Maynard Keynes famous said, “In the long run we are all dead.” This is clearly correct, though it doesn’t solve the problem, or easy the pain to recognise that in the short-term we’re more often wrong than right. As a matter of fact, immediately in front of that often misunderstood revelation, Keynes wrote, “The long run is a misleading guide to current affairs.”

Even the brightest brains have struggled to get short-term predictions right. Bill Gates was one of the few high-profiles voices that have warned the world the danger of a pandemic but even he was unable to tell us such an apocalyptic strike could hit us this year. So we could in a way stop being too harsh on ourselves for failing to foresee the coming of COVID-19 this time last year. And it should also make us feel slightly more comfortable when we are at it again.

If there is one thing that we can almost be sure of about 2021, it will be that “it will be very different to the one just closing,” as James Crawshaw, Principal Analyst at Omdia, puts it. Crawshaw also tells an inconvenient truth about the industry: telecoms is a utility and we have to accept it. “We can all look forward to a gradual return to normality in 2021. The telecom industry has come through 2020 relatively unscathed, as one would expect of a utility service. The market for IT systems that support telcos barely declined in 2020 and should return to low single digit percentage growth in 2021. Not a very exciting headline growth rate compared with some other technology fields but within that overall market trajectory there are some faster growing segments. Omdia’s ICT Enterprise Insights Survey suggests that the majority of service providers will increase their spend on AI tools in 2021. More than half plan to up their spend on customer engagement systems (CRM, mobile apps, etc.). A microservices-based architecture is a pre-requisite for most new software purchases, as is the ability to deploy the software on public cloud. IT budgets remain under pressure in the telecom industry but there is an increasing realization by the C-suite that without IT modernization, telcos will remain commoditised connectivity providers. That is not a future that many boards are prepared to accept.”

“Unprecedented” has become a cliché when used to describe 2020 and the impact of COVID-19 has on every aspect of life, but it doesn’t make it less true. Some changes brought about by the pandemic will go away when life goes back to normal, other changes will be here to stay and become new normal. One of such likely long-term shift is remote working, enabled largely by the communications industry. A result of this change is likely to be a “significant urban-rural migration”, as Mark Evans, CEO of O2 sees it. “The enforced requirement to ‘work from home where possible’ has changed the face of global business and proven the effectiveness of remote working. As a result, an increasing number of people are quitting urban areas in favour of more rural ones,” Evans reckons. “I expect to see this trend continue well into 2021 and beyond and, in turn, increasing pressure will be placed on rural infrastructure. This exodus to the countryside will put pressure on leaders to put rural Britain first for a change. As well as constantly investing in hard-to-reach connectivity, O2 is working with its fellow operators, the UK Government and Ofcom to deliver the The Shared Rural Network (SRN). This will ensure the best possible mobile connectivity for everyone, in all parts of the UK.”

COVID-19 has undoubtedly wreaked havoc to millions of lives, but not everyone has suffered in the same way. Some have even benefited from it, an indication that the pandemic has further polarised the consumer demographic. “There will be ‘the new poor’, those who lost their income, often young and willing to spend on technology, and ‘new rich’,  those who have saved a lot during lockdowns but are reluctant to spend it,” Dario Talmesio, Research Director of Omdia acutely observes. “Cracking such a commercial dilemma will be crucial for CSPs in 2021 because 5G consumers are instrumental for a more critical 5G-related business opportunity. CSPs will start commercializing 5GSA with network slicing, and many more CSPs will deploy 5G core in 2021. After having spent a good part of the past two years in technical and commercial ad-hoc trials, CSPs will be able to start mass-customizing networks for enterprises and industries and demonstrate the benefits of these networks.” Talmesio also believes that there are things that will not change for telcos. “The drive to automation and digitization, the perennial quest to remain relevant beyond connectivity, the cloudification of networks, and the increased involvement of hyper-scale operators in CSPs’ networking businesses will continue to happen and eventually accelerate the pace of a decade-long transformation of the telecom industry into something that is more Tech and less Telco.” When it comes to 5G markets, Talmesio sounds a more optimistic note. “2021 will be the year for 5G mass-market readiness: there will be 0.55 billion eMBB connections by the end of the year supported by more than 270 CSPs globally. With 5G devices in the hands of consumers and Apple’s marketing dollars’ superpowers, some of the anti 5G conspiracists will finally dissipate.”

There is no denial that having the new iPhones supporting 5G has vastly improved the awareness of and enthusiasm about 5G among consumers, but for most consumers the cost of a 5G device is still a key barrier. To this end, Neil Mawston, Executive Director and Devices Analyst at Strategy Analytics, believes that we’re going to see the first 5G phone go below $100. “The average price of 5G Android handsets has halved in 2020. They will halve again through 2021. Surging global volumes, chipset innovation from Qualcomm or MediaTek, and intense rivalry among Chinese device brands mean there will be a race to the bottom on 5G Android smartphone pricing. Expect to see the first sub-$100 models in China, Europe and elsewhere toward the end of next year,” Mawston tells us.

While 5G is going mainstream, so are its failures to deliver on some of its high promises. This has driven certain quarters of the industry to start talking about 6G, though there has been plenty of uncertainty on what 6G is about. Alan Carlton, VP of InterDigital Europe, among many industry executives, believes that 6G must finish the work 5G set out to do but has failed to accomplish. Carlton sees 2021 as “the year that industry attention will turn to 6G. While 5G has made significant moves to a more software defined Core Network and RAN, there are some big steps remaining. Take extended reality—mainstream adoption requires the technology to facilitate both augmented and virtual reality as well as piece the experiences together in real time. This roadmap is very rich, and the truth is 5G may only take us so far.” Another issue that has troubled the 5G ecosystem is power consumption. Despite skilful spinning by companies like Nokia, who argues that energy consumption per gigabit in 5G is lower than 4G, it doesn’t change the fact that 5G’s overall energy consumption will significantly increase because 5G will require much higher data units than any previous generation. Carlton therefore calls for action from the industry to address this issue. “6G must fix 5G’s sustainability shortfall. Put simply, to claim 5G is more sustainable is to say that a Bugatti Chiron is more efficient than a Toyota Yaris because it uses less fuel per horsepower,” Carlton muses.

When it comes to new experience, immersive experience, including AR, VR, or collectively know as XR, has gained much attention, but the total market volume has remained small and consumer purchase limited. This is because, according to Peter Richardson, VP, Partner & Research Director at Counterpoint Research, XR is not a consumer-led market segment, at least not yet. “Throughout most of human history, military arms races drove technical innovation. In more recent times, enterprise needs to enable productivity gains took over as the catalyst for technical developments. From the late nineties, however, the consumer market has been the leading driver of technology innovation. But in VR and AR, military and enterprise needs are, once again, the most powerful forces for change,” Richardson observes. “The launch of Oculus’ 2nd- generation standalone VR headset in October 2020 excited interest, and its relatively low starting price is driving sales, but poor optical quality and a narrow range of either dull or expensive content means we’re not yet an inflection point in consumer interest. However, in the enterprise market, players like Varjo are solving many of the limitations to delivering truly immersive experiences, and this is changing the way enterprises can work and military operatives can train, in fundamental ways. Consumer interest is likely to remain muted in 2021 with VR acting as little more than a niche within the wider gaming market. But as enterprise-focused innovations begin to filter through to consumer-orientated devices, the market will gather pace, multiplying more than six-fold between 2021 and 2025 to be worth over $40 billion,” Richardson predicts.

2020 has also been a year when Open RAN has become the focus of many discussions, ranging from FCC hosted webinar to many inches of columns, including those on this publication. Despite the buzz the technology has generated, its large-scale commercial success has proved elusive, especially in 5G. Robert Finnegan, the new boss at Three UK, recently suggested that Open RAN has already missed the 5G boat. John Strand, Analyst at Strand Consult and often a maverick voice, believes 2021 will be a year of reckoning for Open RAN. “In 2021 the OpenRAN movement will be hit by a reality check. People will recognize that it will take many years before OpenRAN can replace classic RAN on a 1:1 basis. Promised savings for operators will not be so great, and the purported openness of the solution will not necessarily deliver security, at least in the expectation of OpenRAN reducing reliance on Chinese vendors,” Strand predicts. “China Mobile, China Unicom and China Telecom are among some 41 Chinese technology companies which are members of the OpenRAN Alliance. Among the member companies are ZTE and Inspur already banned in the US because of their links to the Chinese military. OpenRAN was purported to give countries an option that was not Huawei, but instead they offer other Chinese entities which have the same security threats.”

This leads us to a prediction of the grander scheme of things, from our own Telecoms.com’s editors. 2020 has seen continued escalation of disputes between the western world, especially the US, and China across many sectors, with Huawei at the centre of the storm. Many have blamed the outgoing Trump administration for the situation we are in due to its combative style. If Huawei, and other Chinese companies caught in the crosshairs (for example SMIC or ZTE), should wish for a reprieve from the incoming Biden presidency starting in January, or even expect an complete change of fortune, or at least to go back to the “good old days”, they may well be in for a big surprise. In a polarised political landscape that is the present-day America, one of the very few policies that can win and has won bi-partisan support is to stand up to China. Recent events do not help. In particular, the Chinese government’s role in the botched IPO of Ant Financial, an Alibaba affiliated company, have pretty much nullified Huawei’s carefully crafted and persistently delivered narrative that it is a private company and the Chinese government, or the country’s ruling political party, has no power to coerce it to do anything. If there is any change in the American policy towards China, it will likely be a more concerted front adopted by the western countries, thanks to Mr Biden’s team’s more collaborative approach towards its allies.

With that we wrap up this list of predictions for the telecoms industry in 2021. Depending on where you stand, some of what is predicted may be good read, some may be bad, and some may even be ugly, but it will not be dull year. None of our contributors has chosen to predict another black swan event like COVID-19, which is probably the last thing this industry, or the world, needs to go through again.

Incidentally, when this piece was going to press, Bill Gates, who has been in the thick of the battle against COVID-19, shared his insight into next year. “In the spring of 2021, the vaccines and treatments you’ve been reading about in the news will start reaching the scale where they’ll have a global impact,” he said. “Life will be much closer to normal than it is now.” Plenty to look forward to.

The role of OpenRAN in securing 5G networks and the IoT

 

 

 

 

 

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Martin Rudd, CTO of Telesoft Technologies analyses the opportunities presented by OpenRAN technology.

With recent announcements of joint initiatives from the likes of Rakuten and Telefonica, Dish Networks and Nokia, it comes as no surprise that OpenRAN is featuring prominently on the list of the most talked about telecoms trends of 2020.

Even the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has championed OpenRAN’s role in helping to make the UK less dependent on larger incumbent suppliers. The benefits are clear – reducing cost and increasing the resilience of mobile networks, as well as speeding up the development of interoperable solutions that can become the much-needed industry standard.

But, OpenRAN was initially heralded as a way for operators to improve network economics by cutting the cost of building mobile networks. The most significant cost in building a mobile network is the RAN. 5G is set to increase these costs further due to increased cell site density, the need for more backhaul capacity, plus various infrastructure improvements to enable new low latency services and applications.

OpenRAN has the potential to provide a much-needed platform for innovation, which helps drive new revenue opportunities and streams for operators and their customers. It’s something that is garnering attention from the wider technology community, beyond the traditional telecoms players. OpenRAN lowers the barriers to working with new vendors, creating a level playing field that enables the introduction and delivery of new applications at the edge of the network.

With vendor-neutral hardware, OpenRAN can reduce the reliance on a small number of vendors by decoupling the hardware and software components of the network. This disaggregation of hardware and software, and the development of isolated network sharing capabilities like node slicing, is making it increasingly feasible for mobile operators to realistically, and securely, share physical network resources as part of their 5G deployment.

The virtualisation that OpenRAN brings allows operators to run more easily and reliably create a distributed edge cloud that can deliver software-based network functions on standard servers. The move to a cloud-native architecture enables network functions and applications to be broken up into small microservices that can be mixed and matched to best suit the application required.

This, in turn, opens the door to local vendors and suppliers across the board, boosting the economy and enabling innovative solutions to the specific needs of that community. Whether it’s an organisation supplying white-box networking hardware or virtualised network functions, or someone deploying an application or service at the edge of the network, anyone adhering to the correct standards can be part of the makeup.

As a result, smart devices can be more tightly integrated into the network, rather than just as connected end points. This is vital to the development of ‘digital twins’ – physical objects that have a virtual online counterpart. These can span everything from simple IoT devices, through to connected multifunction devices and autonomous vehicles, and they extend all the way up to manufacturing, buildings, smart cities and even people.

And this is where perhaps one of the most interesting advantages of OpenRAN comes into play – the potential for it to improve network and data security, especially around 5G and IoT. It’s been a topic of discussion at the recent FCC ‘Forum on Open Radio Access Networks’ and the Prague 5G Security Conference.

It makes sense because the exponential rise in IoT connections (expected to rise to almost 25 billion globally by 2025, according to GSMA Intelligence) will naturally mean more potential threat vectors. And this is where the distributed and virtualised network design of OpenRAN can be advantageous. By implementing a mesh defence strategy, the security load can be divided up and the results aggregated, enabling discovery and provisioning by customer, service or application. Operators can then get a higher-level view and apply strategic decisions that filter right down to the most granular levels. This bespoke and segmented approach can also bolster national sovereignty, by enabling specific network paths to be routed and protected with additional security applications and monitoring.

What’s crucial in this scenario is the ability to monitor all traffic, including encrypted traffic (in a non-intrusive way) which enables SOC/NOC teams to derive threat intelligence or monitor Quality of Service (QoS) across their network. In the event of a large-scale attack, such as Distributed Denial of Service or credential stuffing attacks, the disaggregated and virtualised nature of OpenRAN can enable an operator to shut down a small part of the network and neutralise the attack while minimising network disruption. To accomplish this, operators need an uncompromised view of the network, devices and traffic.

Because OpenRAN seamlessly enables the ability to segregate the network for a variety of different consumer, enterprise and societal services, it can help to integrate data security into every aspect of the network by design, not just at the edge and core. At the same time, local data protection laws can be maintained.

Of course, delivering on the promise of innovation and an open marketplace requires trust. The combination of using open, robust standards and having security implemented by a trusted partner can ensure growth while protecting users and data. This can only be achieved by allowing operators to have as much visibility as possible, end-to-end across their whole network and the control to manage what goes in/out of it. This transparency is something that the large vendors don’t provide.

OpenRAN will enable mobile operators to take back control, reducing infrastructure costs by freeing them from a dependence on those large technology suppliers and their proprietary hardware. It also champions flexibility and interoperability, allowing operators to use the best technology solutions available from a range of smaller suppliers to deliver fast, reliable and secure mobile networking.

Block pay as you go phones to beat county lines drug dealers, police chief urges

 

A police chief today called on telecoms giants to shut down county lines drug dealers’ unregistered pay-as-you-go phones, capable of sending 500 texts to customers in seconds.

Detective Superintendent Gareth Williams says the £1 billion-a-year trade relies on unregistered handsets bought in cash with no questions asked. The mobiles are used to broadcast deals to large groups of buyers.

He has spoken to MPs about a new law similar to the one that significantly reduced metal theft when it became illegal to trade scrap for cash in 2013.

Mr Williams, who leads British Transport Police’s national crackdown on county lines gangs, told the Standard: “I doubt there’s something equally as simplistic as mobile companies helping us with this. Not many people send 500 texts in one go. So why have sims and phones got that capability?

“Mobile companies could stop people buying phones without giving personal details and not let them pay in cash.

“There are privacy arguments, I accept that, but the fact that people can go in a shop and buy 20 phones for £150 is highly unhelpful for us.

“We’ve caught youngsters with £65,000 in illicit cash. You can imagine what those sitting at higher tiers in the organisation are churning.”

County lines is the movement of drugs by gangs from cities into smaller towns, often exploiting children or vulnerable adults. Dealers from London, Birmingham and Liverpool often courier supplies to Brighton, Norwich, Cambridge and north and mid Wales.

Transport police have dozens of officers carrying out operations at train stations and on rail and Tube routes across England, Wales and Scotland.

County line operations have led to spikes in youth violence as gangs use knives and firearms to protect trade. Of 725 arrests, the youngest was just 13.

Mobile UK, the industry body for UK’s mobile operators, said: “While compulsory ID appears a simple solution, maintaining an up-to-date register would be hard to enforce, would not be fool-proof and could have severe unintended consequences for those who really need access to a mobile phone.”

5G infrastructure spend to double in 2020 – Gartner

With one eye keeping an eye on the troubles of Huawei, the likes of Ericsson and Nokia will be buoyed by Gartner predictions that 5G infrastructure should accelerate through 2020.
After years of waiting for the 5G era to arrive, it seems telecoms operators are ready to accelerate deployments. There might have been a brief pause to reprioritise operations during the COVID-19 pandemic, but Gartner does not believe that will have too much of a negative consequence on the sector.
The research firm is predicting worldwide spend on 5G infrastructure should hit $8.1 billion in 2020, double what was spend over the course of 2019. 5G will account for roughly 21% of the $38.1 billion spend on wireless infrastructure, which is a year-on-year dip of 4.4%.
“Investment in wireless infrastructure continues to gain momentum, as a growing number of CSPs are prioritizing 5G projects by reusing current assets including radio spectrum bandwidths, base stations, core network and transport network, and transitioning LTE/4G spend to maintenance mode,” said Kosei Takiishi of Gartner.
“Early 5G adopters are driving greater competition among CSPs. In addition, governments and regulators are fostering mobile network development and betting that it will be a catalyst and multiplier for widespread economic growth across many industries.”
In the early adopter markets, the network deployment competition is becoming increasingly common, while the latter stages of 2020 should see more spectrum auctions to fuel the momentum elsewhere.

Wireless infrastructure expenditure estimates (in millions)
Technology	2019	2020	Year-on-year
5G	4,146.6	8,127.3	96%
4G	20,693.2	16,402.0	-20%
3G	4,146.6	2,608.4	-37%
2G	797.4	472.2	-40%
Core	4,744.7	4,780.3	Flat

France’s telecoms regulator Arcep’s annual status report on the French telecoms market shows that in 2019, operators in France invested €500 million more than in 2018, for an overall total (excluding spending on frequencies) of €10.4 billion. Investments in nominal terms have increased by close to 50 per cent in five years. For the third year in a row, the increase in investment levels is chiefly as a result of a rise in operators’ spending on fibre deployments.
At the end of 2019, 18.3 million premises were eligible to subscribe to a fibre access plan, which represents 4.8 million additional access lines deployed in a single year. Alongside this record growth is the steadily increasing pace of fibre adoption; 7.1 million households had adopted fibre technology by the end of 2019 (+2.3 million YoY).



This increase in spending has gone hand in hand with a decrease in operators’ revenue (-1 per cent in 2019) and virtually unchanged prices for residential fixed and mobile services in Metropolitan France over the course of 2019. After a sometimes very significant drop in prices in 2018, operators scaled back their promotional offers last year.
In terms of traffic, the trend on fixed and mobile networks is in keeping with the previous years. This includes an ongoing surge in mobile network traffic, for voice calls (+4 per cent) but especially for data services (+44 per cent YoY). 4G network users are rising at an increasingly fast pace; up 7.1 million versus 6.1 million in 2018, reaching 54.8 million at the end of 2019. These customers consumed an average 8.6 Gb of data a month, which is 2 Gb more than the year before.

The Telecom Industry Is Proving Essential In The COVID-19 Response

Telecom operators have never been more relevant than they are today, connecting families and communities while keeping businesses and educational institutions logged on.
During this unprecedented time, communication service providers (CSPs) have shown a resilience and willingness to act, giving us a glimpse into the new market reality. In this “new normal,” CSPs are leading the effort for remote working, online learning and social distancing.

Immediate Response: Answering the Call

Around the world, CSPs have responded with a sense of urgency, purpose and empathy. IBM is supporting our CSP clients in their efforts across several fronts:

• Supporting healthcare and government agencies by equipping field hospitals in the U.K. with high speed connectivity and devices, providing insight on population movement to tackle the spread of the virus in the U.S., Asia and the E.U., connecting citizens to vital information, and providing national healthcare institutions with the tools to work remotely and securely as they research treatments for COVID-19
• Extending network capacity by 30-50% to support secure remote working for businesses and to connect teachers and students via virtual classrooms
• Implementing remote and virtual agent strategies to deliver customer care amid escalating traffic to contact centers and digital channels
• Ensuring continued service to residential and small business customers unable to pay their current bills, waiving late fees and opening WiFi hotspots to anyone who needs them 

Short-Term to Mid-Term: Reacting to Market Conditions

As our society and economies are connected and powered by communication networks, the telecom industry has been less impacted in the financial markets than many others. However, over the next few months the industry will need to respond to several common challenges, including:

• Significant pressure on operating expenses, with rapid cost take-out initiatives
• Prioritization of critical capital expenditure aligned to revenue and business continuity
• Supply chain optimization in the face of equipment and labor supply volatility
• Revenue and cash management amid an economic downturn

Longer-Term: Implications for the New Normal

As a new normal emerges, there are a few fundamental reactions that we can expect from the telecom industry:
1.CSPs will likely accelerate their digital transformation, institutionalizing new ways of working for their employees. Consumers and businesses will demand a richer, more consistent omnichannel digital experience with an emphasis on digital self-service. We will see more use of artificial intelligence (AI) to augment call center agents and retail stores, providing for greater customer insight and real-time decisions. 
2.Facing continued pressure on operating expenses and business agility, we expect to see a renewed sense of urgency in shifting to hybrid cloud IT and network architectures and operations with extreme automation. This will propel deployment of open, seamless networks that deliver new levels of orchestration and agility. Changes to accommodate major shifts in workload, load balancing and more infusion of AI/machine learning (ML) into the network at the Core, Edge or vRAN will become key to investment strategies and sustained operational efficiency.
3.We can expect to see more examples of traditional telcos re-inventing themselves as a platform business, operating as both Digital Services Providers and Digital Services Enablers. We are already seeing the impact of COVID-19 on planned 5G deployments—with China and the U.S. continuing, if not accelerating, the pace while several other countries have postponed spectrum auctions and rollouts. As businesses and governments establish their own new normal, 5G and Edge computing will be necessary to deliver the automation, performance and cognitive insight required by many industries—including manufacturing, healthcare, energy and utilities, among others. Telecom operators will need to embrace open ecosystems to externalize innovation and accelerate new services.
4.Cybersecurity will be high on the agenda, as the post-COVID-19 era will bring an increased level of digital access to businesses and information around the globe. CSPs will experience an increase in remote working among their own employees, in addition to an expansion of Security as a Service offerings to support their business customers.
Moving forward, whatever this new normal holds for the industry, we can expect change to impact all aspects of the telecom business. That will include the manner in which providers serve their customers and engage with partners; the work environment they create for their employees; the actions they execute to prioritize investments and streamline their operations; and the steps they take to extend the closer-knit relationships they are forming with local communities.

Feds move to stop US telecom companies from carrying foreign robocalls

Federal authorities are trying to crack down on five US telecom companies who they say are helping flood Americans’ phones with robocalls from overseas. Prosecutors on Tuesday filed for restraining orders in Brooklyn federal court against three companies controlled by Long Island resident Jon Kahen and two companies owned and operated by Nicholas and Natasha Palumbo of Scottsdale, Arizona. A Department of Justice official told reporters the companies act as a “bridge” for calls from fraudsters working in foreign call centers, which are located mostly in India. Officials are asking the court to block the firms from carrying the predatory calls. In just one 23-day sample period, the Palumbos’ companies allegedly carried 720 million calls, 425 million of which lasted less than one second — which the feds say is a sign they were robocalls that didn’t connect or were immediately hung up on. The robocallers’ schemes include posing as immigration authorities and employees from the Social Security Administration or the Internal Revenue Service — then claiming people’s Social Security numbers have been wrapped up in a crime or that they are facing deportation unless they fork over cash, court docs say. The SSA imposter scam is the most prevalent fraudulent robocall, the feds allege. The Federal Trade Commission estimated that the scheme was responsible for $11.5 million in losses to victims last year. “Robocalls are an annoyance to many Americans, and those that are fraudulent and predatory are a serious problem, often causing devastating financial harm to the elderly and vulnerable members of our society,” Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt said. Kahen and the Palumbos did not immediately respond to requests for comment.