Government staff in China have been exposed for gaming facial recognition systems by wearing paper masks printed with their coworkers’ faces to clock in without actually showing up.
The incident took place at the Lijiayang Community neighborhood committee in Wenzhou, Zhejiang Province. According to local media, several officials were reported for falsifying attendance records by using custom-made facial recognition masks.
In a scheme that seems right out of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, surveillance footage shows multiple staff members holding printed face masks and taking turns checking in at the attendance machine. Each attempt was reportedly accepted by the system. One person was able to clock in for several employees by simply swapping masks.
The report claims the community’s Party Secretary took the lead and was seen openly using a face mask to check in, despite a camera positioned above the machine. When questioned, the secretary gave a vague response. An official investigation is now underway.
The whistleblower, identified as Mr. Li, said he reported the matter to higher authorities in October and was promised a response by December 31. It remains unclear how many staff members were involved or how the surveillance footage was obtained.
Chinese workers use facemasks of employees to take turns skipping work
The story quickly sparked backlash online.
“This is corruption. They should all be fired and legally punished,” one commenter wrote. “So many people struggle to find work.”
Others pointed to flaws in the facial recognition technology itself. Many systems rely on basic image matching that analyzes distances between facial features. If the similarity score crosses a threshold, access is granted.
That weakness has been known for years. A 2022 Legal Daily report found that printed face masks costing as little as 10 to 40 yuan could fool some facial recognition systems.
Government staff abusing technology isn’t limited to China. In Canada, federal networks were forced to block Netflix, Prime Video, and other streaming platforms after employees were caught consuming terabytes of content during work hours.
