Launch of EITHOS to empower society against Online IDentity Theft

The context

Over the recent years, online identity theft (OIDT)related frauds have grown at an extremely fast pace, and the increasing assimiLation of digitaL technoLogy in peopLe’s Lives raises both the opportunities for fraud and the stakes of failing to prevent it. OIDT criminals employ a very wide and multimodal set of frauds, ranging from the remarkably simple to the complex and sophisticated.

Nowadays, there is no common way for Member States (MS) to identity crimes internally, and there is no procedure to report them centrally. Not forgetting the lack of modern technological means and training of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA). And finally, very little is known about the needs and experiences of individuals, after they have realised their identity information has been compromised or misused.

EITHOS in a nutshell

EITHOS will develop a novel Identity Theft Observatory System, empowering European citizens, Law Enforcements Agencies (LEAs), and policy makers to further contribute to the prevention, detection, and investigation of identity theft related crime.

It will provide a common gateway for identity theft information and intelligence in Europe, built on top of a modern technological back end, based on two pillars:

(1) Inform & Educate European citizens through the observatory itself and via innovative awareness campaigns regarding the safety of their personal data and identity.

(2) Identify & address the challenges that Police Authorities face against identity theft and develop a robust software toolset to support them and enhance their investigations.

The proposed system will provide easy access to information and intelligence about previous and current identity theft related trends (such as the methods that fraudsters follow to steal information, personal data protection, or the ways that victims can be supported) through its front end, while offering a cutting-edge AI-based technological toolkit via its back end.

Additionally, the project will analyse the societal impact of identity theft, as well as the legal framework under which the utilisation of AI remote technologies and e-evidence exchange can be achieved. Focusing on educating civil society and addressing the obstacles that hinder LEAs to efficiently fight identity theft, EITHOS differentiates from previous projects and other market solutions which often concentrate on digital identity management and secure transactions.

Vicomtech in EITHOS

Vicomtech's broad experience in NLP and Speech Processing Technologies will be the cornerstone of the text and audio analysis tools to be developed in EITHOS. Vicomtech will provide cutting-edge AI tools to analyze unstructured text data. Additionally, Vicomtech will research and develop technologies to detect audio deepfakes and antispoofing.

Stay tuned!

In the following weeks, the consortium will release its website where you will be informed of all our activities. You can already subscribe to our social medias to make sure you don’t miss anything: Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram.

This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 101073928