Cut The Cord (CTC) project aims to prevent and predict, while assisting Law Enforcement Agencies and other entities to fight financial crimes and “cut the cords” to non-traditional products for financing and supporting terrorist organizations.
Technology is changing our lives rapidly. In this context terror incidents are also undergoing a technology-aided transformation. More precisely, the use of cryptocurrencies to enhance anonymity as well as transactional operations in the dark web, prove the urgency to monitor and analyze the financial transactions in an effort to timely prevent actions and funding of global terrorism.
Financial crime exploits every aspect of digital transformation and identifies non-traditional products for financing and supporting terrorist organizations, such as social media, cryptocurrencies, and other financial technologies.
The prevention and disruption of terrorism financing requires international cooperation and advanced investigative techniques based on new technologies. To this end, the CTC project (Cut The Cord) aims to enhance the public-private cooperation through the establishment of a wide stakeholder community, with the vision to sustain it beyond the end of the project. A consortium of ten partners including LEAs’, research centers, public and private organizations will work cooperatively to achieve the objectives of the project.
During the project joint training exercises will be organized, both theoretical and practical in order to build capacity of the Counter-Terrorism Financing end-users, in emerging terrorism financing risks and to enhance the preparedness of end-users in order to be able to tackle the financial activities of terrorist organizations. Counter-Terrorism Financing end-users could be law enforcement agencies, Financial Authorities and payment Services, Cryptocurrency Anti Money Laundering organizations, Financial Information Units and many more.
Finally, the Cut The Cord project will provide technical solutions utilizing Artificial Intelligence tools for data acquisition and analysis of financial transactions (e.g., cryptocurrency transactions), as well as an information exchange mechanism for timely and secure levelled information, intelligence sharing and digital evidence exchange. As a result, Cut The Cord will develop the appropriate framework to improve the investigation capabilities of law enforcement agencies, track criminals’ activity as well as enhance the cooperation between different stakeholders involved in the “investigation supply chain”.
The project was funded by the European Union’s Internal Security Fund — Police programme under grant agreement No. 101036276.