AI-Assisted Timber-Fraud Detection on Romania's SUMAL 2.0 Wood-Tracking System

Since January 2021, Romania's Ministry of Environment, Waters and Forests has required all timber transport to be logged in SUMAL 2.0, with drivers photographing loads and permits in real time and the system cross-checking against satellite forest-change alerts updated every 2-7 days. Investigative reporting found haulers were reusing old photos to fake compliance.

In November 2023 the Ministry partnered with Google Cloud and Zitec to pilot Google Vertex AI for automated scanning of permit photos, aiming to detect fraudulent or reused images at a scale beyond manual review capacity.

The AI pilot processed roughly 400,000 monthly permits and 1.6 million photos in three days (about 0.64 seconds per permit), equivalent to the workload of around 125 additional human reviewers alongside the Forest Guard's approximately 200 staff; the Ministry has since pursued an €8.9 million follow-on tender, partly funded through Romania's EU recovery plan, for licence-plate recognition cameras and LiDAR.

The pilot generated enough suspicious cases to trigger 7 criminal investigations and fines/confiscations exceeding $930,000; over a broader two-year enforcement period, SUMAL monitoring detected more than 2,000 fraudulent transports, €2 million in fines and €1.6 million in confiscated wood. Investigators found the AI reliably caught blatant fakes but struggled with sophisticated fraud such as genuine wood photos reused across different loads.

AI-assisted screening added a scalable fraud-detection layer to an existing wood-tracking system, but its accuracy is limited against sophisticated fraud, and the Ministry is now investing in complementary camera and LiDAR technology rather than relying on photo analysis alone.