Detection and prevention of forgery

DEFINITION: Manufacture or alteration of printed or electronic documents, literary works, or works of art in order to conceal or misrepresent their authorship or terms with the intention to deceive and defraud.

SIGNIFICANCE: forgery is a ubiquitous crime, touching the lives of millions of individuals in ways that range from mere annoyance to financial ruin. The advent of the electronic age opened up countless new avenues for forgers to defraud the public through identity theft and Internet scams. At the same time, computers and sophisticated image analysis software provide powerful tools for detecting forgery, creating a sort of arms race in which white-collar criminals and law-enforcement investigators vie for the technological upper hand.

Forgery is most commonly perpetrated for monetary gain, but it may also serve to enhance personal or national prestige or to fuel political controversy. The crime of forgery can overlap somewhat with counterfeiting, which involves passing off replicas of genuine articles as the authentic articles, and with plagiarism, in which someone represents another person’s work as his or her own. The long list of items subject to forgery includes items documenting the transfer or ownership of money and property, such as wills, contracts, deeds, checks, and invoices; written and printed materials whose rarity makes them valuable as collector’s items, such as postage stamps and celebrity autographs; literary works in the style of dead authors; scientific data; artworks; and documents purporting to give a firsthand view of history. Forgery is sometimes used to perpetrate hoaxes, in which the aim is to deceive large numbers of people not for personal gain but as practical jokes or as means of exposing folly.

Forensic detection of forgery involves analysis of the materials, techniques, and tools used in the production of a fraudulent document or other item, as well as analysis of handwriting, style, and internal facts such as dates. Comparison with known authentic samples is important. forensic is used both to determine authenticity and to track down and prosecute forgers.

Forgery in History

The forging of commercial documents probably goes back to the dawn of written records, although the absence of specific laws relating to written forgeries in either the Old Testament or the Code of Hammurabi suggests it was not common. More evidence exists of the production of documents of religious or mythological significance purporting to be the work of legendary ancestral figures who could not possibly have written them. In the process of assembling what became the accepted Christian Bible in the fourth century CE, Saint Jerome and his contemporaries relied on some of the same techniques that literary scholars still use to distinguish between texts written by accepted figures in the Hebrew and Christian traditions and a mass of apocryphal writings of dubious authenticity.

A low level of literacy and lack of opportunity to compare documents led to rampant forgery in medieval Europe. In 1198, Pope Innocent III issued a proclamation condemning the forging of papal bulls and threatening forgers with excommunication. The pope outlined six elements that judges should look for in detecting forgeries: outward appearance, style, broken thread, doubtful origin of the parchment, erasures and altered words, and broken or indistinct seals.

The Donation of Constantine, the History of Crowland Abbey, and the Shroud of Turin are three well-known medieval forgeries that have been exposed by successively more sophisticated forensic analyses. In the fifteenth century, Italian scholar Lorenzo Valla demonstrated that the Emperor Constantine could not have written a charter granting the Western Roman Empire to the papacy, as the charter was written in ecclesiastical Latin of the eighth century, when the document first surfaced. In the eighteenth century, British scholars who examined the text of the History of Crowland Abbey found many anachronisms that indicated it was a fictitious work written in 1486 to support a land dispute. In the late twentieth century, radiocarbon dating of the Shroud of Turin and X-ray spectrography of the image on this supposed burial shroud of Christ indicated that the object dates from the fourteenth century.

The eighteenth century was a golden age for literary forgery in England. Among the best-known literary forgers were James Macpherson, who published epic poems alleged to be translations from the Scots Gaelic semimythic bard Ossian; Thomas Chatterton, who published quasi-medieval poetry; and William Ireland, who claimed to have discovered a previously unknown play by William Shakespeare. Ireland earned substantial sums from forgeries of letters attributed to Shakespeare, but his attempt at forging a play was immediately recognized for what it was—a clumsy fake. Chatterton’s poetry, in contrast, had real literary merit, and Macpherson relied on a genuine oral tradition in producing his works.

Banknote forgery became a hot political topic in early nineteenth century England. Forgery remained a capital crime in Britain for some time after most nonviolent property crimes ceased to be so punished. Rather than change the law, Parliament concentrated on making banknotes more difficult to forge. The geometric drawing tool that later developed into the Spirograph, a popular children’s toy, was invented to create intricate banknote designs that could foil forgers.

Detecting Forgery

Much forgery detection comes under the heading of questioned document analysis, a subspecialty of forensics. Many questioned document analysts in the United States are independent contractors certified by professional organizations. A few colleges offer degree programs in document analysis, but most practitioners receive the bulk of their training on the job.

In many cases, people who work in positions where they are likely to encounter forged documents are trained to spot obvious fakes. The store clerk who compares a signature on a check with that on the person’s photo identification and the bartender who scrutinizes a youthful patron’s driver’s license are doing rudimentary detective work. Sellers of rare books, historic documents, and memorabilia familiarize themselves with telltale signs of the forger’s art. Serious collectors of books, stamps, and antique currency do the same. Forgeries in wills and contracts often surface when such documents become the subjects of civil legal actions.

Forgery is suspected if the means and materials used to produce a document, or portions of it, are inconsistent with the document’s alleged age and origin. Techniques of papermaking, the chemicals used in ink manufacture, types of writing instruments, fonts used in printing presses and typewriters, and the mechanics of presses, typewriters, and copiers change rapidly and vary from country to country. A steel-nibbed pen produces a more incised line than does a quill pen. The composition of ballpoint pen ink changed significantly in 1952. One line of evidence that pointed to forgery in the case of the diaries purportedly written by Adolf Hitler from 1932 to 1945 and “discovered” in 1979 was a paper type not manufactured before 1950. If individual pages within a document have been substituted, there will often be materials evidence indicating this.

Exposure of the Vinland map as a forgery illustrates the use of modern forensic techniques to analyze a questioned historic document. The “discoverers” of the Vinland map claimed it was a fifteenth century copy of a thirteenth century map that proved the Vikings had settled in North America, something still disputed in 1957, when the map was offered for sale. Radiocarbon dating confirmed the parchment to be fifteenth century, but the carbon ink used in drawing the map had been artificially yellowed with titanium dioxide to simulate discoloration of medieval iron gall paint. The cartographer-forger had also included the northern coastline of Greenland, which is hidden under the Arctic ice cap.

X-ray emission and X-ray fluorescence are two techniques that are used to determine the chemical composition of objects without destructive sampling. When subjected to a high-energy beam of radiation, compounds reemit radiation at a lower frequency in bands diagnostic of the elements and molecules present. The presence of certain compounds in the materials of a given work narrows the time frame in which the work could have been created and can help analysts to identify alterations and additions, including substances used to mask or bleach portions of text.

Handwriting analysis is crucial to forgery detection. It is based on the premise that each person’s handwriting is unique and that certain basic characteristics of a person’s handwriting remain even when the person consciously attempts to disguise his or her writing. Computers make the handwriting analyst’s task much less tedious than it was in the past, measuring such elements in handwriting as slant, character width, connectors, and relative height of letters. In addition to retaining traces of the forger’s normal handwriting, forged writing may exhibit other characteristics, such as uneven speed of execution. A penciled guideline may be detected if a signature was traced. A series of forged signatures will reproduce a single model exactly, whereas a series of genuine signatures will be quite variable.

Political Forgery

Political forgeries are usually perpetrated in attempts to sway public opinion. Such forgeries are particularly dangerous because they may trigger sweeping and irreversible actions before the inauthentic nature of the underlying documents is discovered.

One high-profile example of a political forgery is the 2003 “yellowcake” forgery involving Iraq’s alleged attempts to buy uranium from the Republic of Niger. Documents pertaining to this “transaction” contain many features, apparent even in photocopies, that are inconsistent with their claimed origin. Questions remain as to why intelligence agencies and key US government officials failed to subject the documents to routine forensic analysis before using them as a key justification for going to war with Iraq.

One of the most notorious and malevolently influential political forgeries of the twentieth century is The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in a Russian newspaper under the headline “Programma zavoevaniya mira evreyami” in 1903 and translated into English in 1920. It was claimed that the Protocols originated in the World Zionist Congress and were a blueprint for Jewish world domination. In exposing the forgery in 1921, The Times of London demonstrated that large sections of the work were plagiarized from an earlier (1867) French pamphlet opposing Napoleon III that made no mention of Jews and that the author/translator was unfamiliar with Jewish theology and traditions. Despite this definitive debunking, many people continue to accept the Protocols as authentic, particularly in the Middle East.

Electronic Forgery

Endless possibilities for forgery are opened up by the tremendous power of individual computers, sophisticated yet inexpensive desktop publishing hardware and software, and the Internet. Copying technology that allows a person to scan a document or image into a computer, add or delete elements of the document or image electronically, and transmit the altered file or print it in color has led to the explosive proliferation of fakes in many areas. Originators of critical documents, such as government-issued identification papers, have responded by incorporating holograms, embedded electronic chips, and extremely faint images in their originals.

An electronically inserted signature is readily apparent on a supposed original document, but not in a photocopy. Alteration of electronic records poses a special problem when the original transaction was electronic and no definitive hard copy exists. An unscrupulous Internet-based service provider can alter dates and payment amounts or insert contract terms that were never disclosed to the customer. Detection of such alterations relies on the substance of a customer complaint coupled with inconsistencies such as an impossible sequence of dates.

Cutting and pasting in digital images produce discontinuities in color values, repeated patterns, and objects that fail to line up. Although not apparent on casual inspection, these telltale signs can be detected through computer analysis. Most applicable to doctored photographs, the technique can also be applied to photocopies of written documents, which may show, for example, the failure of substituted text blocks to line up precisely.

Some US states prosecute “spoofing” as forgery. A spoofer hacks into an unsuspecting person’s e-mail account and sends out messages under that person’s online name; this has been interpreted as tantamount to forging another person’s signature. Commonly used to propagate junk e-mail advertising (spam) and viruses, spoofing can also be used to deceive people into divulging sensitive personal information, such as account numbers or Social Security numbers, because they think they have received requests for such information from legitimate financial institutions. The problem of disinformation and defamatory material either being sent from kidnapped e-mail accounts or appearing to come from reputable Web sites is growing. Although e-mail is relatively easy to track, this is often a futile exercise in the case of cybercrime, because the sources change very rapidly and are frequently located outside the United States.

 According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 24 million people over age 16—about 9 percent of the US population—reported some sort of identity theft in 2021. The incidents ranged from credit card and bank account misuse to the misuse of social media accounts. About two-thirds contacted a credit card company or bank to solve the problem, while another 7 percent contacted law enforcement.

Bibliography

Dines, Jess E. Document Examiner Textbook. Irvine, Calif.: Pantex International, 1998.

Innes, Brian. Fakes and Forgeries: The True Crime Stories of History’s Greatest Deceptions—The Criminals, the Scams, and the Victims. Pleasantville, N.Y.: Reader’s Digest Association, 2005.

Nickell, Joe. Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents. 1996. Reprint. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

Silver Lake Editors. Scams and Swindles: How to Recognize and Avoid Internet Era Rip-Offs. Aberdeen, Wash.: Silver Lake, 2006.

“Victims of Identity Theft, 2021.” Bureau of Justice Statistics, 12 Oct. 2023, bjs.ojp.gov/press-release/victims-identity-theft-2021. Accessed 14 Aug. 2024.