What is Document Fraud?
Forging, altering, or falsely presenting a document — prevented by cryptographic sealing and public verification.
Document fraud is the creation, alteration, or misuse of a document to deceive — forged signatures, altered contracts, fake invoices, or counterfeit company stamps. Reported document forgeries rose sharply in recent years as editing tools and AI made tampering easy. The defence is tamper-evidence: a cryptographic SHA-256 seal that breaks if the file changes, a public QR verification page anyone can check, serialized verifiable stamps, and a tamper-evident audit trail. PDF Verified builds all four into every signed document so alteration is immediately detectable.
Common types of document fraud
Altering a PDF after signing, copy-pasting a signature, photographing and reusing a company stamp, or fabricating a whole document. Each leaves no trace on a plain PDF — but fails verification on a sealed one.
How to prevent it
Seal documents with a SHA-256 hash, publish a public verification record (QR), use serialized revocable stamps, and keep an audit trail of who signed when and from where. Re-hashing the file proves whether a single byte changed. See our fraud-prevention overview at /fraud-prevention.