Criminals use selfies to clone victim's fingerprints

HOUSTON -- (KIAH) -- With great camera quality these days, Japan's National Institute of Informatics says they put a digit on how to reconstruct a fingerprint from a pic taken up to 10 feet away. How far away was your last one?

The cloning process requires no special software but must have good lighting when a selfie is taken. So for now, if the light is low, a peace sign you can throw. But as cell cameras grow, your two finger selfies could become more of a security risk.

We asked our friends at the Houston Forensic Science Center's latent print department what they thought.

“Down the road as 3D printing gets better with different materials being used someone could somehow fabricate a set of fingerprints to fool a bio-metrics scanner, but I do not think it is there yet," an official said.

The Japan Institute, which thinks the tech is there, is developing fingerprint protection in the form of a thin film to be placed over the fingertips. However, it's at least a couple of years of away.