A Chinese woman managed to enter Japan illegally by having plastic surgery to alter her fingerprints, thus fooling immigration controls, police claim.
This is a case of a woman who underwent surgery to alter her fingerprints in order to get past Japanese immigration procedures. Apparently, the measures worked and she was only found out when arrested on an unrelated charge.
The surgery switched the fingerprints of the thumbs and index fingers between the two hands, presumably to allow the person to present the original or modified fingerprint when given the option of which hand to present to a scanner.
It makes me wonder if fingerprint transplants between people are also a viable threat. It is also not clear how 10-print systems that record fingerprints from all the fingers, such as those now used by US immigration, who handle such finger swapping.