With the nature of terror incidents undergoing a technology-aided transformation (e.g. use of cryptocurrencies to enhance anonymity), the monitoring and analysis of financial transactions play a pivotal role in the 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 organisations, 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. 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. Joint training exercises (theoretical and hands-on) will be organised to build capacity of the Counter-Terrorism Financing end-users (law enforcement agencies, Financial Authorities and payment Services, Cryptocurrency Anti Money Laundering organisations, Financial Information Units etc.) in emerging terrorism financing risks and to enhance the preparedness end-users to tackle the financial activities of terrorist organisations. Finally, CTC will provide technical solutions based on Artificial Intelligence tools for data acquisition and analysis of financial transactions (e.g., cryptocurrency transactions), as well as an information exchange mechanism based on decentralized technologies, to ensure secure and levelled information and intelligence sharing, along with digital evidence exchange in a timely manner. As a result, CTC will develop the appropriate framework for sharing financial data to model suspicious transactional behaviour at the points of ingress and egress between traditional and digital economy, track the audit trail that has been followed by the criminals, improve the investigation capabilities of law enforcement agencies, and enhance the cooperation between different stakeholders involved in the “investigation supply chain”.

MKLab is responsible for the management and supervision of the scientific and technical outcomes of the CTC project. MKLab also leads the Work Package on Data analysis & AI-based multimodal information correlation with particular focus on the tasks related to (i) the analysis of social networks activities to detect suspicious money flows and (ii) the correlation of multimodal data across heterogeneous data sources to identify malicious financial transactions. Furthermore, MKLab also leads the development of tools for the discovery of relevant (textual) material on the Surface and Dark Web, as well as on social media platforms, and for the analysis of the acquired multilingual text in order to support the identification of suspicious activities and events, including indications of illicit trade and funding.