Woman foils fingerprint security to enter Japan

According to a news report from BBC News, a Chinese woman had plastic surgery to altar her fingerprints, successfully fooling immigration to enter Japan illegally. The woman, Lin Rong, had been previously deported for overstaying her visa. The whole scheme came to light when Ms Lin was caught on separate charges, and police noticed "unnatural scars" on her fingers.

The surgery was apparently done in China. The cost? $15,000 and it was good enough to foil the biometric security in Japan. Together with palm readers, fingerprint scanners represent the easiest to implement form of non-password based security. Increasingly, biometric devices are also used to implement solutions such as attendance-taking to control and access for facilities.

For now, the cost--and scarring--is likely to be a high enough barrier for most people thinking of committing some form of mischief. If anything however, this demonstrated ability of criminal networks to foil fingerprint readers, proving that no security is unbreakable.

For more on this story:
- check out this article at BBC News

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