Identifying, analysing and solving Illicit Money Flows

Challenge

With the rise and spread of ICT-enabled crimes and illicit financial flows (IFFs), law enforcement agencies (LEAs) and financial intelligence units (FIUs) need innovative policing tools in the virtual sphere as well as skills, organisational and regulatory adaptations to counter these threats. Detecting and tracing hidden and illicit money flows are notoriously difficult, as organised crime networks operate on a global scale and use legal loopholes, as well as technical innovations to protect their activities.

Objectives

In TRACE, we will address these challenges, by improving investigation tools and/or systems in terms of their quality and speed, co-developed with LEAs, responding to traditional and emerging forms of organised crime, money laundering and terrorist financing. We will address these challenges, by providing not only state of the art tools to trace illicit money trails, but by providing a flexible modular open-source platform, which can be used to increase the innovation capabilities of LEAs, including advanced techwatch and foresight capabilities to improve LEAs’ innovation rate in AI services. Finally, the integrity and accountability of these AI services are increased, as the trail of input and/or output of data can always be traced and identified if needed.

Our Role

With expertise in cybercrime, information security, privacy and data protection, Privanova brings a myriad of experience toward alleviating illicit money flows through the TRACE project. In addition, our involvement in similar project of interest to the international law enforcement community such as CC-DRIVER, IoT-NGIN and MARVEL will be of additional benefit to TRACE.

Drawing upon our professional experiences from INTERPOL and network of high-level LEA officials we created during our tenure there, we will support the operation of the consortium by ensuring the interaction between them and the LEAs. This will enable both sides to address the issues related to the development of tools for locating and mapping hidden service directories, forensic analysis and data provenance models. Besides, Privanova will establish an ethics advisory board comprising of four external ethicists as well as two consortium partners.

In collaboration with LEA partners, Stakeholder Board members and other law enforcement experts we will invite to contribute to the project, Privanova will evaluate and maintain the ethics compliance across all consortium activities. This will directly benefit the technical partners responsible for ensuring that illicit money flows are detected early, their threat level is analysed, and preventative actions are enabled to reduce the negative impact of such flows.  The project officially started on July 1^st 2021, with the TRACE Kick Off meeting being held virtually several days later.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and Innovation programme under grant agreement N°101022004. All information on this website reflects only the authors’ view. The Agency and the Commission are not responsible for any use that may be made of the information this website contains.