Man stolen as toddler found 18 years later thanks to FaceApp challenge
Written by Millennium on July 22, 2019
A man who was kidnapped as a toddler was reunited with his family after 18 years – when the police managed to track him down using face ageing app technology.
Yu Weifang, 21, this month met his parents for the first time since he was a child – all thanks to the FaceApp-style Al technology created by Chinese tech giant Tencent.
Similar to the trending face aging app, police used the technology to predict what the 21-year-old would look like now and matched his features to a database with thousands of people.
The cold-case investigators in south China’s Guangdong Province used the Al technology along with existing facial recognition intelligence to locate the missing man.
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After sorting through nearly 100 potential candidates, officers narrowed them down to 21-year-old Weifang – a student school in China’s Guangzhou province.
Investigator Zheng Zhenhai said: “When he found him, he refused to believe that he was a kidnapped child, but DNA confirmed that he was a match with his biological parents.”
Weifang, whose adoptive parents named Li, went missing in 2001 near a construction site where his father worked.
His parents filed a missing person report and the incident was treated as a kidnapping case.
His biological parents Yu Xingquan and Rong Muhuan searched high and low in neighbouring cities but could not find any trace of their missing son.
They even offered a reward of Sh1.5 million for anyone with information at the time.
SOURCE: sde.co.ke