The UIDAI (Unique Identification Authority of India) recently added a new security feature to the Aadhaar Enabled Payment System (AEPS). The security feature is known as fingerprint ‘liveliness,’ and it is expected to help prevent the use of forged fingerprints to withdraw money via AEPS.
According to an ET report, a senior government official stated that the new feature has been pushed to AEPS point of sale (PoS) machines via a software upgrade. The PoS can now determine whether the fingerprint being used belongs to a living person or not.
The official mentioned above also stated that instances of fraud are extremely rare (about 0.005%). According to current statistics, AEPS has enabled over 1,507 Cr last-mile banking transactions. As a result, there have been approximately 7.54 lakh fraudulent transactions in the system (a simple calculation, taking the number of transactions and the percentage of fraudulent transactions).