It's quite easy to fool most high-end fingerprint scanners, at least older ones. If you're persistent, you can do so with a bit of gelatin and a laser printer.
There are some scanners that try and look for eg. the motion of the blood pulsing through the veins with infrared, but I'm not familiar with them.
This issue is called "spoofing / liveness detection," if you want to go learn more. It's quite a popular topic at conferences like ICB, IJCB, and BTAS.
http://vast.uccs.edu/~tboult/tmp/fingerprint-boult-koaa-medi...
There are some scanners that try and look for eg. the motion of the blood pulsing through the veins with infrared, but I'm not familiar with them.
This issue is called "spoofing / liveness detection," if you want to go learn more. It's quite a popular topic at conferences like ICB, IJCB, and BTAS.