South Korea will require facial recognition for all new mobile phone subscriptions from July, matching each applicant’s face against their official identification photo at sign-up, but the mandate will initially leave out foreign residents. The Ministry of Science and ICT says the work to link the scanning system with separate foreign-identity databases is not ready, so non-citizens will be excluded until a second-half rollout.
The requirement is aimed at the burner phones behind the country’s voice-phishing networks. Under the policy, telecommunications operators must match a customer’s official ID photo against a real-time facial scan during the sign-up process, closing a gap that lets fraudsters register phones under stolen or borrowed identities. The crackdown is squarely aimed at budget carriers, whose non-face-to-face online registration has made them the main channel for the practice, accounting for 92.3 percent of seized illegal phones in 2024, up from 76.5 percent in 2022.
Excluding foreign residents reopens a sizable part of the problem the rule is meant to fix. Figures submitted to the National Assembly show that of the illegal phones seized between 2020 and 2024, roughly 46 percent were registered to foreign nationals, 106,018 against 124,889 registered to South Korean citizens. Launching a domestic-only system risks steering criminal activity toward the very group left outside the check.
A Ministry of Science and ICT official defended the split timeline as an operational compromise, saying that while launching for both groups at once was preferred, it was more practical to get the domestic framework running first while accelerating the secondary software. Telecommunications workers have warned that the delayed foreign-resident system, deployed without a standardized pilot, could subject legal foreign residents to verification failures and processing delays, while consumer groups have raised concerns about the storage of biometric data.
The mandate follows the groundwork laid when South Korea extended its facial recognition SIM registration pilot to June 2026.
The Ministry says the rollout for foreign residents will follow in the second half of the year.
Sources: Aju Press
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By the ID Tech Editorial Team
