TRACE

New Methods to PRevent, Investigate and Mitigate COrruption and TAX Crimes in the EU

 
 

TRACE, will give LEAs the tools they need:

·        to better follow illicit money trails,

·        to detect and analyse cross-border money flows used by criminals and terrorists using innovative technologies developed by the project,

·        develop, test and validate new technologies for detecting illicit money flows and finally

·        increase efficiency and effectiveness of information sharing among EU LEAs.

TRACE introduces a multi-disciplinary approach that targets the delivery of an on-line investigation analysis system to fight money-laundering by tracking illicit and suspicious money flows, provide intelligence analytics for network reconstruction, harmonise e-evidence standards and foster asset recovery

TRACE will do this by providing a highly modular open source framework for money laundering investigations to LEAs, which can be used to increase the innovation capabilities of LEAs, including advanced techwatch and foresight capabilities. Simultanously, the accountability of these AI services will be increased, as the trail of input and/or output of data will always be traced and identified if needed.

Activities

TRACE adopts a five-pronged approach.

1. TRACE will develop use cases for deploying innovative, advanced analytical technologies.

2. We identify patterns of money laundering and use these patterns to train and develop a suitable infrastructure for collecting relevant resources from Surface Web, Deep Web and Dark Nets and to store them in a high-performance repository for further processing.

3. We develop analytical services to facilitate ease of use of data. These range from neural machine translations, speech-to-text video transcription and automatic content categorization system to network filtering and visualization.

4. We build the TRACE framework with backend infrastructure and service integration that unifies prior outcomes.

5. We analyse cross-border investigations and prosecutions across the EU to asses practices and develop recommendations.

TRACE will help develop durable solutions in compliance with inter alia the rule of law, European fundamental rights and data protection legislation by taking a co-creative and ethics-by-design approach which also addresses societal aspects (e.g., side effects of technological solutions, societal resilience), the issues of location, jurisdiction and the cross-border nature of such crimes.

 

Partners

  • Conventry University (United Kingdom)

  • Trilateral Research (Ireland)

  • Austrian Institute of Technology GmbH (Austria)

  • Ertzaintza (Spain)

  • NOVA University, Lisbon (Portugal)

  • Aston Business School (United Kingdom)

  • Tax Justice Network (United Kingdom)

  • CIN Consult GmbH (Austria)

  • PROFLOW (Austria)

  • Privanova (France)

  • Bavarian Police Academy (Germany)

  • Czech National Crime Agency (Czech Republic)

  • KYC Portal (Malta)

  • Expert Systems - Cogito (Italy)

  • Systran (France)

Runtime

TBD

Funding

TRACE has received funding by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme H2020-SU-SEC-2020 under grant agreement no 101022004.

 

[Links]