Federal investigators used facial recognition software to catch a fraudster who’d faked his own death, according to a Jacksonville.com article by Steve Patterson. The biometric technology was used to analyze a photo the man used in a fraudulent passport application under an assumed name, and matched it to a passport photo under his own name from 1996.
The fraudster’s real name is Jose Lantigua, though when he was apprehended he had been living under the name Ernest Wills. While he was caught in North Carolina, he’d been sought for fraud committed in Florida, where he had taken large loans and used them to buy real estate for his family before faking his own death in Venezuela in the spring of 2013. Federal investigators, suspicious of the properties purchased in North Carolina under the name of Lantigua’s wife, staked out her home, and eventually saw reason to suspect that a man visiting her on her birthday was in fact her late husband. Having apprehended him, their biometric scan was able to match his face on the passport photos despite his new toupee and dyed beard. According to Patterson’s article, he admitted his true identity immediately.
This kind of technology is increasingly proving valuable to law enforcement authorities. In a recent and much more serious case, facial recognition technology was used to track down a convicted killer who had fled New Zealand to Brazil, also using a fake passport. With biometric technology increasingly being embedded into passports themselves, these kinds of incidents should significantly decrease in number in the coming years; in any case, many law enforcement authorities are increasingly using mobile biometric scanners to immediately identify suspects in the field.
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March 25, 2015 – by Alex Perala
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