Government employees caught using masks of colleagues to trick facial recognition & skip work

by

Okay, so this is wild. Apparently, some government workers in China were getting away with not actually being at work by printing out photos of their coworkers’ faces on paper masks! They were basically tricking the facial recognition time clocks. I mean, I spend hours perfecting my in-game avatar, but using someone else’s face to clock in? That’s a whole new level of gaming the system, and not in a good way!

In Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province, officials at the Lijiayang Community neighborhood committee were accused of cheating the attendance system. Reports say they used specially made masks to trick the facial recognition technology.

It appears some employees were cleverly bypassing the attendance system, much like in the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Security footage shows staff members sharing printed face masks and using them to clock in for each other. The system apparently accepted each attempt, allowing one person to register time for multiple colleagues.

Okay, so I’m reading about this crazy thing happening over in the local government. Apparently, the big boss, the Party Secretary, was caught on camera using the check-in system with a face mask on – even though there was a camera right above it! When someone asked about it, he didn’t really give a straight answer. Now they’ve launched a full investigation, which is pretty wild. It just feels… weird, you know?

Mr. Li, the whistleblower, reported the issue to his superiors in October and was told he’d receive an answer by the end of December. It’s still unknown how many people were involved or how the surveillance video was acquired.

Chinese workers use facemasks of employees to take turns skipping work

The story quickly sparked backlash online.

Man, seeing that really got to me. Someone commented, and they were totally right – it’s just blatant corruption. Like, these people need to be held accountable, fired and face legal consequences. It’s especially frustrating because so many good people are out there struggling to even find a job.

As a fan, I’ve been reading about how these facial recognition systems aren’t perfect, and it’s really interesting. Apparently, a lot of them work by just measuring distances between your eyes, nose, and mouth. If those measurements are close enough to a stored image, it lets you in – it’s a pretty basic comparison, actually, and seems like it could be easily fooled!

This security flaw has been recognized for some time. A 2022 report in Legal Daily showed that simple printed face masks, costing only 10 to 40 yuan, could sometimes deceive facial recognition technology.

It’s not just in China where government employees misuse technology. In Canada, officials had to block streaming services like Netflix and Prime Video because workers were using huge amounts of data to watch them on the job.

Read More

2025-12-16 00:49