A Chinese woman who had been deported from Japan for overstaying her visa wanted to get back in so badly that she had plastic surgery to change her fingerprints. Japanese customs officials never discovered Lin Rong, 27, was back in the country until she was arrested on a different charge and her true identity revealed.
When police arrested Ms. Lin last month for allegedly faking a marriage to a Japanese man, presumably to guarantee her stay in Japan, they noticed she had odd scars on her thumbs and index fingers. Investigators said she confessed to having paid $15,000 to have her fingerprints switched by removing the skin of her fingertips and grafting it back on the opposite hand.
She’s now being charged for the very new crime of biometric fraud. Japan is one of many countries to use a biometric recognition system to check fingerprints, and so it’s inevitable that something like this would happen sooner or later. In fact, it’s not even the first time. Last year a South Korean woman managed to fool the machines by putting a special tape on her fingers.
The United States uses a biometric recognition system too. There’s no word on what expensive piece of hardware is going to be needed to replace what’s already become a beatable system.