Are nothing new, really.

The indian state of Bihar has been the first to use biometric systems to verify voters identity. Predictably, there were problems.

As far as I can tell, the incidents are isolated cases, and were discovered soon enough to get the culprits and learn useful lessons for the future. In the same spirit, it’s useful to share what went wrong and why, as a reminder that no technology makes miracles, or is really “foolproof”.

In those Bihar polls there have been reports of fraudsters “taking out money from accounts of voters by taking their fingerprints wrongly in other devices”.

One man who handled the biometric identification machines during the polls later admitted that he had “secretly taken the fingerprints of the voters on his phone before they had put their fingerprints in the biometric machine to cast their votes." With those data, he was hable to access the bank accounts of some of the voters and withdraw their money.

During the inquiries, it also came up that “around four months back some unidentified persons took fingerprints of villagers in the name of providing loans."

Same old, same old

All in all, there is little new in these news, or in the procedures used to steal money. When you think about it, the fingerprint-taking trick is just the smartphone-based version of waiters going in the back of a restaurant with your credit card, and swiping it through their own “skimmers”. The main lesson from those frauds in India, that is, is that new, shiny, “digital” systems can be just as fragile as their predecessors, and often are. Especially (NOT always!) when they are sold as foolproof.