TRACE Project
Outcomes

Coordinate and manage the project and its partners, including quality control, and risk and innovation management. 

Objectives:

  • Distribute funding from the European Commission and ensure the project’s compliance with the EC’s financial guidelines.
  • Co-ordinate and implement the project’s data management plan.
  • Interact with the project’s Stakeholder Board.
  • Bring the project to a timely conclusion

TRACE develops use cases that depict the challenges of disrupting financial flows of criminal money. The project also demonstrates how TRACE toolkits help to detect, trace and disrupt such flows.

Objectives:

  • Collect and analyse user requirements from law enforcement agents.
  • Develop use cases to test the efficacy of TRACE technologies.
  • Discover and map money flows from these use cases and share that data with financial investigation units and law enforcement agencies across the EU.
  • Analyse and compare at least six cross-border investigations and prosecutions across Europe to identify gaps and good practices

TRACE consortium works to identify patterns of money laundering and use them to train and develop a suitable infrastructure for collecting relevant resources online. The information is stored in a high-performance repository for further processing.

Objectives:

  • Monitor and update secrecy parameters in EU jurisdictions.
  • Develop a source identification crawler to discover potential money laundering networks in Surface Web, Deep Web and Darknets.
  • Develop a downloader to download and document the multimedia web data from potential money laundering networks.

TRACE develops analytical services needed to build the investigation knowledge graph for the TRACE framework’s backend infrastructure.

Objectives:

  • Develop automatic translation services for online sources.
  • Develop automatic video transcription service for streaming videos.
  • Reconstruct links and relationships through visualisation and filtering.
  • Identify the author of written text snippets through stylometric analysis.
  • Design and evolve a natural language processing analytics engine.

Create the TRACE tool backend infrastructure and service integration.

Objectives:

  • Create a reasoning mechanism
  • Analyse geographic risk for illicit financial flows
  • Develop intelligence analytics and visualisation
  • Create the TRACE investigation knowledge graph
  • Create a system architecture and case management​

TRACE develops a user-friendly interface and front-end in order to allow law enforcement agents and investigators with any level of IT expertise to work with TRACE tools.

Objectives:

  • Co-create investigation tools and systems in conjunction with law enforcement agents
  • Develop the TRACE front-end / UI architecture
  • Validate the TRACE system

TRACE develops legal and practical tools, as well as policy recommendations to optimise information sharing in transnational investigations on illicit financial flows.

Objectives:

  • Analyse and compare at least 14 cross border investigations and prosecutions involving illicit financial flows across Europe to identify gaps and good practices
  • Construct a model based on analysis of suspicious transaction reports (STRs)
  • Harmonise information formats across EU member states so that LEAs can more easily share data
  • Assess the scope and efficacy of European cyber forensics and produce recommendations to improve capacities and policies.
  • Organise a working group of EU LEAs to share and improve information sharing best practices.

The project addresses the data protection, legal, social and ethical issues raised by the development of the TRACE technologies.

Objectives:

  • Respond to the ethics requirements of the European Comission
  • Conduct ethical, social, legal and human rights impact assessments of the TRACE technologies.
  • Develop practical solutions to the data protection, ethical, social and legal issues raised by the TRACE technologies.

TRACE integrates the findings from the project in the development and validation of training materials for LEAs and FIUs.

Objectives:

  • Develop curricula, training courses, seminars and workshops to educate stakeholders in the use of TRACE technologies.
  • Convene seminars, webinars, workshops and a tabletop exercise.
  • Update, revise and publish the project’s training materials based on feedback from participants

Dissemination activities support the project’s plan for the uptake of the TRACE tools by law enforcement agencies and financial intelligence units. The communications activities help inform the public about the project and its results.

Objectives:

  • Develop and implement the project’s dissemination and exploitation plan to ensure that TRACE tools reach the target users.
  • Create and maintain the project’s website and social media accounts.
  • Produce and use the project’s dissemination and communications materials.
  • Deliver recommendations to policymakers and other stakeholders.

TRACE identifies a set of ethics requirements that the project must comply with, and ensure they are respected.