EES confused twins at Romania's border. What went wrong.

A British woman was questioned by border police at Cluj-Napoca airport in Romania in late May, as she tried to fly home, because EES appeared to show that she had never left the Schengen area after a visit to Amsterdam in April 2026. POLITICO, which employs her, reported that she had not been to Amsterdam that April. Her identical twin sister had, and the system seems to have confused the two women on the strength of their identical faces, and possibly their shared surname, date of birth and nationality.

What EES actually recorded

The twin’s departure from Amsterdam, on 12 April, two days after EES became fully operational, does not seem to have been properly registered. Niovi Vavoula, chair in cyber policy at the University of Luxembourg, told POLITICO that the exit check had probably been carried out when EES was “not fully ready or there was a malfunction” at the crossing point. That left what looked like an open stay: an entry with no matching exit.

When the other twin tried to leave from Cluj-Napoca weeks later, Romanian officers accused her of being in the Schengen area illegally. When she explained that she had an identical twin, she was initially accused of lending out her passport. She was questioned for around 15 minutes and was eventually allowed to fly. Her twin was back in the UK at the time and has never been to Romania.

Why a fingerprint or passport check should have resolved it

EES collects two biometric identifiers: a facial image and fingerprints. Identical twins can look almost exactly alike. They do not share fingerprints, and in this case they had different first names and their own passports.

According to Vavoula, EES rules say authorities should not identify a traveller from a facial image alone, but should also match it with the fingerprints or the passport, which would all have been different here. She said the Romanian authorities appeared to rely on facial images as the sole identification method.

After POLITICO published the story, the Romanian Border Police said it had carried out an internal review. It said EES had functioned properly, but that border staff had not followed “the applicable operational procedures”, that the data in the system had been corrected, and that it had already given additional training to border control staff. It called the episode an isolated incident.

What this reveals about how EES handles facial recognition

The case is unusual. It needed a specific set of circumstances: identical twins with independent travel histories and an exit that was not properly registered. The Romanian Border Police called it an isolated incident, and for the vast majority of travellers EES will work without this kind of problem.

But the case illustrates something important about the system’s design. Facial recognition is one input, not a final determination. The full biometric check, face and fingerprints together, is what EES is built around, alongside the passport data. Relying on the face alone removes the safeguard that makes the system reliable.

Missing exit records are a separate, known issue in the early months of EES operation. The system became fully operational on 10 April 2026, but the preceding rollout phase involved partial deployment at different crossing points at different times, and the EU says travellers’ data may not have been registered at every crossing point during that period. Some exits from October 2025 to April 2026 may therefore be missing, and, as this case shows, problems did not stop on the day the system went fully live.

What to do if EES shows something incorrect about you

If a border officer raises a discrepancy at the desk, ask them to check your fingerprints and passport, not just a facial scan. You have the right to know what EES holds about you and to ask for inaccurate data to be corrected. The official EES site says to contact the data controller in any of the countries using EES, preferably one you travelled to, and a Commission spokesperson told POLITICO you can raise it with a member state’s authorities at the border too.

The process for doing this outside a live border encounter is covered in the guide to checking and correcting your EES record. It explains how to ask for a copy of your record, how to request a correction, and where to complain if a correction is refused.

Does EES have an error-correction route for missing exits?

Yes. If your EES record shows an entry with no exit and you did leave the Schengen area, you can ask for the record to be corrected through the same rectification right. Expect to be asked for evidence that you were outside the Schengen area, such as a boarding pass or a dated receipt from abroad. The process takes time, so it is worth checking your record before you travel again if you suspect an exit was not captured.

For a full explanation of what EES records, how long that data is held and what the EES system is designed to do, the main EES guide covers the detail.