In eastern China’s Zhejiang province, employees at a neighborhood committee in Wenzhou have been caught using printed images of colleagues’ faces as masks to trick a facial-recognition attendance system, reigniting debate about both the reliability of facial recognition deployments and the governance of public-sector timekeeping.
According to local reporting cited by the South China Morning Post and NDTV, a resident lodged a complaint after surveillance footage appeared to show committee staff holding paper masks up to the attendance terminal to clock in colleagues who were not physically present. The practice reportedly allowed one person to record attendance for multiple employees, with the incident captured by a camera mounted above the check-in device. Authorities are said to be investigating after the video circulated online and triggered public backlash.
The case underlines a well-known weakness of low-resolution or poorly configured facial recognition systems. They can be vulnerable to simple presentation attacks using printed photos or masks, particularly when there is no robust liveness detection, challenge-response mechanism, or secondary authentication factor in place. A 2022 report from China’s Legal Daily, cited in the NDTV coverage, previously found that some older devices could be fooled by masks costing the equivalent of just a few US dollars.
For CISOs and security architects, the Wenzhou case is a reminder that deploying facial recognition for workforce attendance or access control without anti-spoofing and process controls can create a false sense of security. In environments where incentives to cheat are strong and oversight is limited, attackers may not need deepfakes or advanced masks to compromise biometric systems. Risk assessments for such deployments need to account not only for algorithmic performance, but also for presentation attack detection, sensor quality, operational monitoring, and the broader culture of compliance within the organization.
Sources: South China Morning Post, NDTV
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By Cass Kennedy
