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There is so much personal data stolen around the world that South Korea will force people to undergo real-time facial recognition when registering a new mobile phone number, in an attempt to stop fraud using illegally registered accounts.
The South Korean government announced on Friday that it will require local mobile operators to verify identity of new customers through facial recognition, with the hope of reducing fraud.
According to a statement from the South Korean Ministry of Science and Technology, cited by , South Korea faces a problem of criminals who register accounts mobile phone and then use them to carry out fraud, such as voice phishing.
The new policy thus extends the current customer authentication mechanisms, which already require buyers to present verifiable identification documents at the point of sale, adding the facial recognition verification.
The three main mobile operators in South Korea — SK Telecom, LG Uplus and Korea Telecom — already offer an application called “PASS“, which stores digital credentials. Under this new scheme, facial biometric information stored in this application will be used to confirm identity.
According to , candidates will have to scan their face using the PASS application, developed jointly by the three operators and widely used by public bodies.
In the statement, the Ministry states that it hopes that this requirement will make it much more difficult to register a cell phone account using only stolen data.
Given concerns related to biometric data collectionthe Government ensured that the process is limited to checking whether the real face of the candidate corresponds to the photograph contained in the identification document and that this data will not be stored.
The Executive also plans to review the law to oblige operators to alert customers to risks of being involved in crimes associated with illegally registered cell phones and, also, to impose on them the supervision of new additionswith the aim of preventing fraudulent activities by retailers.
South Korea, with a population of almost 52 millionthis year registered two major data theft incidentswhich affected more than half of the country’s residents.
Recently, the online retail platform inadvertently disclosed more than 30 million records of personal data — a case that cost its executive director his job.
The South Korean authorities had already applied a fine of 100 million of dollars to SK Telecom, after they became aware of particularly poor information security practices, which included credentials from its infrastructure displayed in plain text on an accessible server via the Internet.
The operator also stored millions of user credentials without encryption in the database, making life easier for attackers who wanted to clone customers or add devices to their accounts.
The incident will now cost the operator another 1.55 billion dollarsafter the country’s Consumer Disputes Mediation Commission determined on Sunday that the company must compensate all 23 million customers of the company in 100 thousand won, around 57 euros, per person.
Half of this fine will be passed on to customers in the form of credit on invoiceand the rest in loyalty points, which can be used in many commercial establishments.
Not all responsibility lies with SK Telecom: the facial verification announcement states that virtual mobile operators were responsible for 92% of counterfeit cell phones detected in South Korea during 2024.
It is not surprising, therefore, that South Korea intends to introduce procedures tighter before allowing the opening of new mobile accounts.
