Indonesia will require facial biometric verification for all new SIM card registrations starting July 1, moving the measure from trial to mandatory enforcement after a five-month pilot with the country’s major mobile operators. The Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs, known as Komdigi, said the requirement is intended to confirm that the person registering a new mobile number is who they claim to be, reducing fraudulent registrations and identity misuse.
Under the new process, a person registering a new number completes facial biometric verification rather than relying only on the national identity number, national identity card, and family card data used in the previous registration system. Antara reported that the biometric process tested at mobile operator outlets took less than one to two minutes, making it faster than the prior document-based workflow.
The mandate follows a trial that ran from January through April. Komdigi’s director general of digital ecosystem, Edwin Hidayat Abdullah, said roughly 1.4 million new mobile numbers were registered using facial verification during the pilot, and that the verification systems operated by the three major carriers, Telkomsel, Indosat Ooredoo Hutchison, and XL Axiata, proved reliable. The positive evaluation of those systems is what cleared the way for the July 1 enforcement date.
The policy targets a specific fraud problem. Criminals have exploited gaps in identity-number-based registration to activate SIMs using stolen national identity and family-card numbers, then used those numbers for scams and other abuse. Binding a new registration to a live facial match against the civil registry is designed to make that substitution far harder, since the registrant must be physically present for the capture.
The mandate builds directly on the pilot Indonesia ran with its carriers. Komdigi trialed face recognition for SIM registration to curb scams with operators including Telkomsel, using on-site liveness detection to confirm a real, present person, and has separately moved to mandate biometric registration tied to national identity numbers as part of a wider telecom-identity tightening.
Sources: Antara News
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
