Document Forgery Detection: 12 Signs Our Analysts Look For
Forgers are good. Our analysts are better. Here are the twelve tells they look for on every submission.
Document forgery has moved from crude Photoshop jobs to professionally templated PDFs with embedded fonts and metadata. Catching them requires knowing where to look.
The twelve signs
- Font substitution: a sans-serif where the issuer uses a serif
- Kerning and letter-spacing inconsistencies
- PDF creation tool string does not match the purported issuer
- Missing or mismatched embedded font subsets
- Hidden text layers and revision history
- MRZ check digit failures
- Hologram and UV feature absence on the scan
- Template reuse against known fraudulent samples
- Date and serial-number logic errors
- Photo splicing with inconsistent compression artefacts
- Metadata timestamps outside business hours in the issuer timezone
- Running-balance arithmetic that does not reconcile
Automation plus analyst review
Our document verification product flags the first eight automatically and routes the remainder to analysts with domain-specific playbooks.
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