MRZ or Machine Readable Zone is a particular area in an identity document (passport specifically) that encloses the document holder’s personal data. Nowadays, almost every country’s official identity or travel documents have MRZ, containing confidential information encoded. Generally, MRZ has two or three lines with the OCR (Optical character recognition) font text printed.
The MRZ-based documents are referred to as Machine readable documents because a machine only reads the texts they contain.
How does the MRZ help you identify fraud:
A machine-readable zone contains encoded machine-readable lines/codes that include the document holder’s data and forgery detection numbers known as “checksum”.
As mentioned above, a special reading device is used to detect MRZ and read the information encoded inside. For travel documents such as passports, text recognition and conversion technology (OCR system) is used to read MRZ data and verify it.
See the following image to recognise the machine readable zone in a passport:
Why you should pay attention to MRZ flags:
It’s not difficult for fraudsters to tamper with identity documents and manipulate the holder’s personal information for their purpose in modern times. Many times we have heard the news of fake passport gangs in Europe and across the globe engaged in forging documents.
A machine-readable zone in a passport and other identity documents is a significant step to prevent unauthorised alteration in the IDs. Furthermore, it is an ideal way to speed up the verification process.
Since passport verification is a standard procedure during a background check, MRZ-enabled passports have been proved useful in verifying suspected identities. After all, the machine-readable zone contains almost all the crucial detail of a person such as a name, nationality, date of birth, sex, passport expiration date, etc.
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