India deploys fingerprint liveness detection to combat Aadhaar payment fraud

India’s finance minister says custom-coded anti-spoofing software has been deployed, designed to prevent biometric fraud on the Aadhaar-enabled payment system.

AI code was created by the Unique Identity Authority of India, which has declined to provide development details. It performs finger-minutiae and -image recording and detects liveness during Aadhaar authentication.

The code is a response to people creating silicone fingerprints to illegally siphon money from accounts.

In May, Airtel Payments Bank and the National Payments Corp. of India (NPCI) launched UIDAI-written a facial recognition authentication app for the Aadhaar transactions.

Meanwhile, Indian payments service firm Paytm is developing AI to enable payments through facial recognition, says Vijay Shekhar Sharma the company’s founder, according to the Deccan Herald.

Still, technology alone will not solve the problem, particularly when a business correspondent is the bad actor. Business correspondents are informal bank agents who have biometric point-of-sale machines.

After a customer gives access to their banking details and enrolls their biometrics, little prevents a correspondent can increase the amount of money and skim the difference. This works particularly well when customers don’t get a receipt for the transaction.

According to India’s Home Ministry, 694,000 financial crimes, such as money laundering and fraud, were reported in fiscal 2021-2022, up sharply from 262,000 the previous year, says Indian Express.

Aadhaar is the basis of numerous biometric applications in India.

People registering for goods and service tax numbers in the Indian Union Territory of Puducherry should expect to be asked to perform a risk-based biometric Aadhaar authentication as part of a pilot program.

Article Topics

Aadhaar  |  biometric liveness detection  |  biometrics  |  fingerprint biometrics  |  fraud prevention  |  India  |  payments  |  UIDAI