Over 64 lakh or 6.4 million "fraudulent" phone connections, detected with the help of facial recognition, have been disconnected by the Indian government in the last six months.
The tool, ASTR or Artificial Intelligence and Facial Recognition powered Solution for Telecom SIM Subscriber Verification, developed by Department of Telecommunications' (DoT) Centre of Development of Telematics (C-DoT), detects the usage of the photo of a single person for procuring SIM cards beyond the permitted number of times.
As per DoT regulations, a person is permitted to have only 9 sim cards with an Aadhaar card. However, C-DoT's ASTR found that in some cases a single person has procured phone connections, not just hundreds of times, but in thousands.
The usage of facial recognition in governance and in commercial entities skyrocketed during Covid-19 as a touchless alternative to various processes. However, since then its usage, which entails the processing of large databases, have persisted in the absence of proper data protection frameworks. India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act was passed in August 2023, and is yet to be implemented.
How it is detected
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 time.
"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 Moneycontrol.
Upadhyay said that there have been cases where a person took multiple sim cards by wearing disguises during the registration process.
"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 vector 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 opines that 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 with victims running into lakhs across India.
After detection
After C-DoT through ASTR, detects such cases, the concerned telecom service provider is notified.
After that, notices are sent to such persons and they are asked for KYC proof. And after 60 days, if authorities do not receive the proper response, the connection is disabled.
Additionally, Upadhyay said, authorities have also started to take action against the outlets that sell such SIM cards in bulk.
"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.
The WhatsApp connection
However, Upadhyay notes that they are also looking out for WhatsApp profiles associated with such fraudulent numbers.
"Typically when such connections are taken in bulk for perpetrating cyber crimes, the sim cards are buried after time. However, what we found is that these perpetrators don't deactivate their WhatsApp profile," he said adding that a sim card is needed only once for registering on WhatsApp.
Since 2023, citizens have been bombarded by scammers who have started reaching out to potential victims through WhatsApp. "So we have also been getting the WhatsApp profiles deactivated," he added.
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