Biometric Solutions To Help Detect Frauds And Forgery

Biometric Solutions To Help Detect Frauds And Forgery

This post is also available in: heעברית (Hebrew)

As part of its efforts to fight online frauds, the Arizona Department of Transportation has signed an agreement with NEC Corporation to develop new face recognition technology.

NEC Corporation of America, a global developer of facial-recognition technology, has declared that it will start supplying biometric solutions for the Department of Transportation in hopes that this will improve that process of issuing state-sanctioned credentials.

With NEC’s new facial recognition software, NeoFace, employees in the department could find what they are looking for in a database which exists in the cloud and contains about 16 million digital photos, about 7.7 million of those are ID and license photos.

Combined with another biometric tool, the Reveal, government officials could do a photo search and compare it with the ID and license photo in the state database. By having access to this database, the number of cards issued based on false information is expected to be reduced greatly.

According to Arizona Republic Daily, the department of Transportation has begun using this facial recognition system earlier this year and claimed that since then, 1,600 alerts on fraud detection were raised between the months of February and July. “This technology allows us to take a proactive approach to protecting people’s identities and stopping fraud,” said Terry Conner, the department’s assistant director.

Transportation offices in over 30 states are now using facial recognition softwares to detect frauds and forgery. The state of Arizona has also started using the software and has reported 33 potential cases of fraud within a month. The New York Department of Transportation has also been using a face recognition software since 2010 and has claimed that this technology has assissted in making 3,500 arrests in the state.

The Israeli governments have been dealing for a while now with the need to replace the ID and travel papers which are currently being used with smart biometric documentation that includes modern biometric and electronic data. In many cases, the stolen and fake IDs are used for impersonating the ID owner, to commit fraud or criminal acts or for hostile destructive activity.

The Paraguay police, for instance, has announced last April that since March it has arrested 11 people of Arab descent, most of them citizens of Iraq and Syria, after they had allegedly used fake Israeli passports in order to enter Paraguay. Considering the threats the West is facing today – threats which are no longer necessarily restricted to borders of state territories but cross countries and continents – it could be that such local biometric databases will grow to become more than just cooperations for passing data and warnings, but will become large databse containing information on crime and terror organizations available to any country who wishes to defend against them.

Subscribe to our newsletter.