Chinese media recently reported that several members of staff at a neighbourhood committee in Wenzhou City, in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, were suspected of aiding co-workers to skip work by wearing printed masks of their faces to trick the facial recognition system. They were thus able to clock in without actually showing up for work.
The secretary of a neighbourhood committee, a man surnamed Li, is suspected of having led a group of people in skipping work by using printed masks of their faces. This way, one or two people could clock in for the entire group while they tended to their personal business.
It is unknown how many members of staff were involved, or how they managed to fool the facial recognition software with what looks like paper cutouts of people’s faces, but their method was discovered after several of the offenders were caught by the CCTV camera above the facial scanner.
Neighbourhood committees are the lowest form of administrative governance in China. Their members are not civil servants and are not paid salaries, but they do receive allowances, so the offenders were receiving some sort of compensation illicitly.
“This is corruption. They should all be fired and even legally punished. There are so many people who struggle to find a job,” one outraged person commented on Weibo, China’s version of X.
“Some of us have to work more than 10 hours a day, while some would not even work for eight hours,” someone else lamented.
Although the allowance fraud was bad enough, what really intrigued most readers in China was how the committee staff members were able to trick what was supposed to be a high-tech facial recognition system with rudimentary paper masks. In a day and age when AI seems capable of virtually anything, you really don’t expect that kind of thing.
