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.