Over 6.4 million 'fraudulent' phone connections detected by government with the help of facial recognition
By MYBRANDBOOK
In the last six months, the Government of India has disconnected more than 64 lakh or 6.4 million "fraudulent" phone connections detected with the help of facial recognition.
The ASTR or Artificial Intelligence and Facial Recognition powered solution developed by the Department of Telecommunications' (DoT) Centre of Development of Telematics (C-DoT) detected that the photo of a single person has been used for procuring SIM cards beyond the permitted number of times. The solution has been developed for Telecom SIM Subscriber Verification.
According to regulations of DoT, a person can have nine sim cards with an Aadhaar card. But the ASTR tool found that in some cases a single person has procured phone connections, not just hundreds of times, but in thousands.
The facial recognition algorithm detects the similarity of facial features of a person in the phone registration database to find if he or she has procured a connection beyond the permitted number of times.
"We run this exercise on 140 crore, complete database of India. It is a very complex process and nowhere in the world has such a large database been processed simultaneously," Rajkumar Upadhyay, CEO of C-DoT told a news source.
He also mentioned cases where a person took multiple sim cards by using disguises while going through the registration procedure.
"Even when a person takes multiple sim connections by wearing disguises, the database tries to find similarities in these photos. We call this 'facial vector' and every person has a unique facial vector. And vectors such as a person's lips, eyes, they don't change with disguises," Upadhyay said.
"After that, the algorithm tries to find more people with similar facial vectors who have procured sim cards. That is because by law, one cannot take more than nine connections. But in some cases, we found even 1,000-2,000 photos," Upadhyay added.
Upadhyay is of the opinion that majorly most of such connections are used for cyber frauds such as impersonating as fake customer care agents to dupe unsuspecting customers. In the last few years, such cases have increased manifold and law enforcement agencies have been grappling with its magnitude with victims running into lakhs across India.
After detecting such cases, notifications have been sent to the concerned telecom service provider. Then notices are sent to such persons and they are asked for KYC proof. After 60 days, in case the authorities do not receive a proper response, the connection is disabled.
He also added that authorities have initiated measures to address the outlets selling these SIM cards in large quantities.
"What is the source of these sims? They had to have been purchased at a shop. We have now caught them too, because these frauds would not have been possible without their involvement," he said.
Singapore to remove One-Time Passwords from Bank Accounts
According to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, clients who utilise secur...
Is 375 million Airtel subscribers database breached?
When a hacker claims to have accessed and put up for sale a customer databa...
The government of India intends to construct a single portal f
A single portal will be launched by the Indian government to list all of it...
OpenAI offers GPT-4o, a faster model available to all users at
GPT-4o, a faster and more sophisticated AI model, is made available to all...
Icons Of India : Arjun Malhotra
Arjun Malhotra, the Chairman of Magic Software Inc., is widely recogni...
Icons Of India : NEERAJ MITTAL
He started his career as an IAS Officer in 1992. He has held various a...
ICONS OF INDIA : RAJIV MEMANI
As Chair of the EY Global Emerging Markets Committee, Rajiv connects e...
BEL - Bharat Electronics Limited
BEL is an Indian Government-owned aerospace and defence electronics co...
IOCL - Indian Oil Corporation Ltd.
IOCL is India’s largest oil refining and marketing company ...
NIC - National Informatics Centre
NIC serves as the primary IT solutions provider for the government of ...
Indian Tech Talent Excelling The Tech World - PADMASREE WARRIOR, Founder, President & CEO - Fable
Padmasree Warrior, the Founder, President, and CEO of Fable, is revolu...
Indian Tech Talent Excelling The Tech World - Aman Bhutani, CEO, GoDaddy
Aman Bhutani, the self-taught techie and CEO of GoDaddy, oversees a co...
Indian Tech Talent Excelling The Tech World - Steve Sanghi, Executive Chair, Microchip
Steve Sanghi, the Executive Chair of Microchip Technology, has been a ...