UR Codes: The path to universal adoption

FaceTec VP of Government Relations, Owen McShane, dealt with thousands of counterfeit driver’s licenses while he was in an investigative role with New York State before joining the 3D identity verification software provider. The need for a biometric binding mechanism like FaceTec’s UR Codes was clearly demonstrated by the way those fakes changed over the years. Perhaps most striking is how widely that need is felt, from confirming police officers are who they claim to be in a huge urban center like New York City, to securing borders in Africa.

The fake driver’s licenses McShane found were mostly confiscated from 19- and 20-year-olds who had been trying to purchase alcohol, but in the last 5-10 years, fake IDs have become a much more serious issue. Individuals in their 20s, 30s, and 40s are using counterfeits to commit fraud. What used to enable underage drinking now fuels fraudulent car purchases, fake loans, and illicit bank accounts.

“In New York, we added a digital signature to the PDF-417 barcode,” McShane explained to Biometric Update. “So on the back of ID, in the bar code, we added an extra hash and digitally signed it. So if you had the public key, you could immediately validate the document. And it worked great.”

But, while criminals could not use a counterfeit when the digital signatures were being checked, they could use the real license of a person who looked a lot like them. With only manual visual comparisons to rely on, impersonation fraud increased significantly.

“UR Codes add to the security of a digital signature with a biometric link,” McShane explains. “They biometrically bind that document to the person. No one else can use it.”

When a 2D face photo is encoded into a UR Code, once scanned with the free UR Code Scan + Match App or SDKs, it allows identity verification in about five seconds with a 1-in-100,000 False Accept Rate (2D:2D Matching), or 1-in-2 million FAR with a 3D Liveness check (3D:2D Matching).

At ID4Africa 2025 in Addis Ababa this year, McShane found that representatives of African countries were reporting a different version of the same problem as in New York. Biometric passport bearers have been breaking the electronic chip to force the border guards to fall back on a visual inspection.

“Now,” he says, “they’re realizing that for only the cost of the ink they can add a UR Code and still have each passport biometrically strongly bound to the right person.”

FaceTec will return to ID4Africa 2026 to further educate about the benefits of UR Codes.

Replacing or avoiding manual reviews

Manual reviews include bias, especially from the human tendency not to want to call out changes in a person’s appearance, McShane points out. Even police and border officers are not immune to this social pressure.

UR Codes have also drawn a lot of interest from DMVs (Departments of Motor Vehicles), because there is usually a delay between when the person qualifies for the physical driver’s license and when they receive it. Adding a UR Code “to the interim document allows them to have a temporary document that verifies it’s them,” McShane says. He reports FaceTec is currently in talks with about 10 DMVs about this use case.

But it’s not just temporary licenses that McShane could see benefiting from UR Codes.

“In the past 15 years, we’ve seen DMV driver’s licenses go from mag stripes to PDF-417 bar codes, and now PDF-417 bar codes with digital signatures,” he says. “I believe the next transition will be to include UR Codes in many of the physical documents as well. It can be as small as 2cm by 2cm, and it works great and can be scanned by any smartphone.”

African officials told McShane that a lot of the ID documents they produce do not include security features because they are too expensive. Adding UR Codes for the cost of printing provides the security and assurance they are looking for, and at an incredibly low cost.

“We’re hearing about a lot of use cases that I never really anticipated,” McShane says.

Employee IDs are another big use case for UR Codes.

In New York alone, there are over 600 local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies. Each one has its own ID, McShane says. “There are no standards for what an ID needs to look like, but it allows the holder to carry a firearm anywhere.”

Agencies, therefore, need a way to electronically validate the issuance of these IDs by a legitimate police agency.

FaceTec supplies the UR Code Encoder software to government agencies, educational institutions, NGOs, and non-profits at no cost. They can create as many UR Codes as they need for free.

“The more UR Codes are added to documents, the more identity theft we will prevent,” McShane says.

ID theft is the number-one consumer crime in the U.S., and FTC data shows it is skyrocketing. The 2025 Trends in Identity Report from the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) shows a surge in impersonation scams, as AI makes it easier for cybercriminals to trick victims into giving up their identity credentials.

UR Codes printed on common civil identity documents like driver’s licenses will help reverse this trend. “This will bind your legal identity data to you and prevent others from using it, in person or online,” McShane says.

Adoption underway

McShane and his colleagues at FaceTec have been meeting with law enforcement groups to show them UR Codes and making demo “ambassador cards” for interested attendees. Forces from around the U.S. and Canada are working to add UR Codes to their officer and staff ID cards, he says.

The first law enforcement agency to adopt UR Codes began adding them to IDs in August, and a U.S. shipping port began issuing credentials with UR Codes in September. More than 100 law enforcement agencies are working to add UR Codes to the IDs they issue.

Interest in implementing UR Codes in Africa is more related to passports and national IDs, McShane says. They could also help with security at embassies, he says, which have been another area of discussion with potential customers.

“The more we educate about what the technology can do, the more interest we get,” McShane says. “We’ve gotten inquiries from amusement parks, concert venues, and rental companies; along with critical infrastructure, nuclear power plants; anywhere you need to know exactly who you’re interacting with.”

FaceTec has also received inquiries from colleges to add UR Codes to student ID cards.

“RFID cards cost a few dollars a piece, and students tend to lose them a lot.” It is far more cost-effective to use an ID with UR Codes, McShane explains.

“We’re fortunate that we have so many great partners who are finding their own unique use cases for UR Codes,” he says.

Outreach efforts

FaceTec has educated about UR Codes at Identity Week Europe and presented them at Intergraf Currency+Identity in Milan this year.

Several European countries have initiated conversations with FaceTec about adding them to passports or national ID cards after seeing UR Codes for the first time at those events.

And in North America, the first police agency to sign up is adding UR Codes to law enforcement IDs and HR218 cards.

The company will participate in more than 80 events in 2025, and is scheduling an even larger number for next year. FaceTec delivered a presentation on UR Codes to some 1,500 sheriff’s departments at the National Sheriff’s Association Conference in Ft Lauderdale in June, and will present to a similar number in 2026 at the NSA Winter Conference in Washington, D.C. In October, FaceTec demonstrated UR Codes at the International Association of Chiefs of Police, where over 3,000 law enforcement officers were in attendance.

Some events are in smaller jurisdictions as FaceTec engages with the thousands of police departments across the United States.

“We’ve had a lot of positive feedback from law enforcement agencies across the country, and I think you’ll start to see that grow even more over the next year,” he projects. “We first introduced this technology in September of 2024, and we already have numerous agencies using it, and it’s just going to continue to steamroll forward.”

Deploying UR Codes is easy, McShane says, “We’ve worked with different agencies to streamline the on-prem software installation, and simplify the adoption process as much as possible.”

FaceTec’s team will guide “any law enforcement, any government agency, any nonprofit that is ready to add UR Codes,” but expects sales to come largely through the partnership channel. FaceTec is in talks with the companies that produce the majority of the physical ID documents in the United States and is solidifying partnerships with them because the States are demanding UR Codes on their legal identity documents.

“The customer is always right, as they say, and the state DMVs are demanding that the vendors that print their ID cards can include UR Codes. So I’m spending a lot of my time with those large vendors, getting them set up to print UR Codes on the driver’s licenses and ID cards.” McShane told us.

“UR Code technology is what we need to drastically stop fraudulent IDs from costing us billions. The cost of UR Codes is so low and the security ROI so high that we will see them on thousands of different document types for billions of people, and the transition to biometrically-bound IDs has already begun.”

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Article Topics

biometric binding  |  biometrics  |  digital ID infrastructure  |  FaceTec  |  identity document  |  UR Codes