Huge flaw in new biometric checks means thousands of passengers face being stopped at the border
ANOTHER problem has arisen with the new EES entry rules for Europe and it could affect thousands of people.
In a recent case, one woman was questioned about her travels when she was confused for her sister.
EES has been introduced to use biometrics and fingerprinting to stop the need for manual checks at the border.
But it appeared that the system failed to correctly identify one woman from her twin sister.
As reported by Politico, the case involved one Brit who was accused of being illegally in the Schengen zone.
She was questioned by police while trying to fly back to the UK from Cluj-Napoca in Romania in May.
Romanian authorities at the airport said that the woman’s departure hadn’t been properly recorded after a visit to Amsterdam in April 2026.
The problem was that she hadn’t been to Amsterdam – but her identical twin sister had.
EES appeared to have confused the twins despite taking biometrics.
The woman was questioned for about 15-minutes but was ultimately allowed to fly home.
Around 12,000 sets of twins are born in the UK every year, so this could cause problems for thousands of people.
Asking experts what could have caused the flaw in the system, Niovi Vavoula, chair in cyber policy at the University of Luxembourg, gave two possible explanations.
The first suggestion is that there may have been an improperly registered exit for the twin in Amsterdam.
The second they explained could have been down to the Romanian authorities in Cluj.
Niovi Vavoula told Politico, “It appears that the authorities are not well trained to distinguish between different processes and rely on facial images as the sole identification method.
“The fact they didn’t check the passport details in the EES, nor take into account that the EES is still fresh and there are various problems, shows what is called anchoring bias — when you rely on the first piece of evidence and disregard everything else.”
Romanian Border Police responded in a statement that said that EES had functioned properly at the time.
But that data in the system had to be “corrected” by border staff, who it added had not followed “applicable operational procedures.”
They added “we emphasise that this is an isolated incident and should not be considered representative of the overall performance of the [EES] system.”