Forgery/Counterfeits

Introduction

Forensic document examination is a complex matter requiring various areas of expertise to identify document forgeries of all kinds. Although in the modern office the electronically mailed document is of growing importance, the traditional (paper) document still has its place, and thousands of different kinds are used for documentation purposes. The threat of illegal document forgery exists and will always exist.
The examination of questioned documents is an ongoing challenge to forensic sciences, to cope with the modern technology of document manufacturing and the increasingly sophisticated document forgeries. The many facets of modern documents demand many areas of expertise from forensic specialists in order to identify and authenticate a questioned document. The identification of handwriting is a discipline of its own, requiring for appropriate trained experts to compare and identify handwritings. The aim of the examination of technical typewriting and printing produced by office machines is to determine typestyle and origin. In addition to the written or printed content, it is necessary to examine other document components. Ink and paper examination, by nondestructive and analytical methods and techniques, help to determine its authenticity with respect to origin. These areas are equally relevant in general questioned document examination, but when documents of high value and protected by the law are fabricated for criminal purposes, the forensic document analysis may be of even higher importance and special expertise is required. Counterfeiting and forgery of value and security documents occurs on a large scale.


The Threat

Counterfeited documents are documents that are reproduced as originals. The entire document is a fake, e.g. counterfeited banknotes, bonds, checks, vouchers, driving licenses, lottery and admission tickets, stamps, certificates etc. If the reproduction is made by using materials and procedures which do not correspond to the original, the counterfeit is called an imitation.
Forged documents are altered originals produced by adding, removing or substituting relevant information or features, for example a modified check amount, an imitated signature on a contract, altered passport or gift certificate, altered payment card or credit card.
The counterfeiting of banknotes, bonds, checks or driving licenses and the illegal reproduction of passports and travel documents and check and credit card fraud are high profile crimes, committed mostly not by an individual, but by criminal organizations involved in terrorism, illegal cross-border traffic, drug trafficking, financial transactions or other activities of organized crime. By definition, such highly valuable so-called security documents, such as banknotes and passports, should be specially protected against misuse. The higher the value of a document (absolute or relative) and the greater the damage caused by fraudulent actions, the higher the risk of fraud. Therefore, there will be greater protection of the document against fraud. However, a great number of these documents are still too easy to counterfeit, because they do not meet the minimum standard of manufacturing. If a banknote of reasonable quality can be reproduced by the use of modern desk top publishing or simply with a full color copier, then document securities are missing. If a security document, such as a passport, can easily be altered by substitution of the passport owner’s photograph or by chemical eradication of the passport entries, the document securities of the passport do not meet the necessary standard to prevent counterfeiting and forgery. The threat of document counterfeiting and forgery has become twofold, due to the quantity and the quality of counterfeited and forged documents.
The increase of fake documents of all kinds, the flood of low-profile security document fraud, mainly for immigration and cross-border purposes as well as the frighteningly good quality of some seized currency counterfeits, give rise to concern, which is much greater than just a forensic dimension.
Document fraud by counterfeiting and forgery is no longer a form of crime exclusively encountered in white collar crimes or secret intelligence activities. Document counterfeit and forgery is nowadays found in all forms of crime. Statistics regarding the most often counterfeited currency worldwide – the US dollar – or the number of seized fake travel documents at border controls and immigration services, show frighteningly high figures for these trans-national phenomena. The relevant question of the document examiner ‘genuine or false?’ is certainly not trivial. What is considered genuine and what is considered fake? Even valuable documents are too often of such poor quality that it is not particularly difficult to imitate them.
The improved technology of modern office machines has meant that almost perfect reproductions of an original can be produced. This is unfortunately true not only for low profile documents used in daily business, but also for security documents. The full color copier has become the most often used tool for illegally reproducing value documents. Used as a printer device linked with a computer, it offers a wide range of technical features to match the copy to the original. Colors can be balanced, numberings changed or signatures scanned. Even some of the traditional security features, for example the security thread of banknotes, can easily be imitated.
Banknotes are documents which are normally not altered, but counterfeited, however, the situation is different in the case of check fraud. Bank checks and personal checks are value documents which are, or should be, protected against misuse as banknotes are. However, the level of securities is mostly considerably lower, making it even easier for criminals to forge. Besides reproducing the entire check from scratch, the threat of check fraud comes from altered written checks and forged stolen blank checks. The main obstacle to altering an already written check is the erasing and substituting of entries without revealing the changes. In the case of forged blank checks the important challenge for the forger is to imitate the check owner’s signature.
Another category of faked documents, similar in complexity to check fraud, are counterfeited and forged identity documents. The attraction to the criminal forger is – unlike banknotes and checks – not the pecuniary value, but the ability to create a new identity. Since modern identity documents, such as passports or IDcards and driving licenses, are complex documents with respect to manufacturing and technical set-up, it is easier and quicker to alter genuine documents than to counterfeit an entire document. Statistics from immigration services forgery desk examination make it clear that among the hundreds of different IDdocuments used worldwide, there are still too many in which the substitution of the identity of the document holder is not a difficult task for a skilled forger. As for check fraud, one of the forger’s difficulties is the alteration of typewritten and/or handwritten entries. Moreover, the document holder’s photograph must be substituted, quite often this is not a difficult task, since the weakest link of most easily altered IDdocuments is the document’s protection against substitution of the photograph. Many of these documents have ring staples and dry or wet stamp cachets to secure the photograph, which do not give any protection against substitution. Even thin-laminate sealed photographs are no problem for the professional forger who has little difficulty in splitting the photograph substrate in half to get access to the picture without breaking the laminate.
A final category of document complexity are the machine-readable documents, such as payment cards and credit cards, and also plastic card legitimization documents, for example modern identity cards, driving licenses and the various types of smart cards. The threat of misuse of plastic money and plastic cards is inescapable and this form of fraud is increasing dramatically. Small-scale forgeries involve the altering of stolen cards. In addition to altering the entries on the plastic substrate, the manipulation of the stored information on the magnetic strip, the electronic chip, is an additional difficulty. However, this obstacle can be overcome if necessary. The threat of today’s card fraud is, however, the amount of organized crime involved in forgery and the counterfeit of plastic cards. The criminal organizations produce blank cards with machine-readable devices, which are then delivered to the customer for encoding and, if necessary, to be completed by printing, embossing or additional optical security devices (for example hologram).
It is true that despite the high quality of some professionally produced forgeries and counterfeits of security documents, the forensic specialists have little difficulty detecting the fraud when checking a questioned document thoroughly. The recipient of these counterfeited documents, however, is likely to be an unskilled and not technically equipped customer.

Document security

It goes without saying, that there are different classes of documents, according to the probability of fraud, the damage caused by it and the absolute as well as the relative value of the document. The class which is best protected against counterfeiting and forgery is high-value documents, such as banknotes, passports, checks and credit cards. Whereas other value documents, such as stamps, vouchers, certificates, admission tickets, stamps, lottery tickets, visa documents, permits and many others may be considered as a class of lower security value and therefore also of lower document security protection. The understanding of the counterfeiting and forgery potential of different types of document demands an enhanced know-how of the state of the art of technical document securities and the respective possibilities and limits. Generally speaking, there are three approaches to improve the technical security of a document against counterfeiting and forgery.
First there is the use of exclusive materials and controlled substances: the higher the value of a document, the more exclusive the materials for manufacturing should be. Controlled substances should be produced by a restricted number of manufacturers and not normally used for the production of common documents; for example paper from specialized paper mills, paper containing special fibers, papers without optical brightener, multilayer polymers for synthetic documents, printing inks of particular spectral composition, printing inks specially resistant to chemical eradication or alternatively, especially sensitive to chemical attacks etc.
Secondly security printing techniques should be used. Besides offset as the most common technique used in printing, special printing techniques such as letterpress, intaglio (relief printing) and silk-screen are highly effective and not easy to imitate.
Thirdly, additional security attributes should be used. There are various security devices to improve the protection of a document against counterfeiting and forgery. These are used either in combination with the document materials during manufacturing or added on the printed document. These modern security devices include (among others):
• Paper securities: watermarks; fluorescent fibers and planchettes;
• Printing securities: guilloche pattern (printed background pattern of interlacing fine lines); simultaneous printing (perfect fitting of recto/verso printing); fluorescent and magnetic inks; optically variable inks (ink taking on different colors depending on the angle of viewing); rainbow printing (continuous change of colors); microprinting (extra small printing to be seen only after magnification); latent images (visualization depending on angle of viewing); scrambled indicia (scrambled latent image, only visible through a special lens);
• Securities of personalized entries: text printed by use of matrix printers or laser printer; digitized laser printing of text, photos or signatures;
• securities to prevent substitution of pages, photos: staples; embossing stamps (dry stamps), stamp cachets; optically variable devices OVD(holo-grams, kinegrams, latent images); protective films (thin laminates) with ink printing, retro-reflective-pattern, diffraction grating image; perforations;
• machine readable securities: OCR printing; magnetic strips.

Methods of Examination

The methodology of document counterfeit and forgery analysis is first a question of where the authenticity checking takes place. Depending on the form of fraud and the type of document involved, a first examination will not necessarily be done in the document laboratory, but at the first line of inspection; for example bank institutions, immigration services, border controls, social security services etc. Therefore, the personnel should be capable of identifying a false document (in the time available and technical support) before sending it to the forensic document laboratory for thorough checking. For suspect documents, that are not identified by a first line of checking, the entire examination process will be handled by forensic experts to confirm or refute the suspicion.
There are three levels of detection of counterfeited or forged documents, depending on the authenticity features to be checked.
Level 1 includes features, which can be visually examined without special equipment, such as watermarks, security threads, relief structures, latent images, stamps (dry stamps or stamp cachets), OVD (e.g. kinegrams), mechanical erasure, perforations of staples, residues of adhesives, obliterated writing and other visible traces of manipulation.
Level 2 refers to features to be checked with technical facilities such as: visible light to look at printing quality, traces of substitution or relief effects; UV light to detect UV-fluorescent securities (paper bleaching, fibers, printing) and UV-visible forgery traces (chemical eradication); infrared radiation to examine writing inks; reading devices to detect magnetic printing; special viewing systems for retroreflective securities; reading systems for machine readable devices.
Level 3 examinations have to be carried out in the document laboratory, with sophisticated equipment that can not be used for field examination.
• Electrostatic examination of latent impressions of handwriting and detection of indentations (indentations of erased writings, traced signatures on checks or passports);
• Juxtaposition as well as superposition comparison with the microscope or by digital image processing, to visualize faint printing defects;
• High magnification microscopy examination to detect trace evidence of mechanical erasure or substitution (residues of writing and printing ink, adhesives; traces of cutting, evidence for manipulation of staples, binding, stitching, etc.);
• Infrared absorption and infrared luminescence examination to decipher nondestructively faint or obliterated writing and printing (traced signatures, modified stamp cachets);
• Microspectrophotometric (colorimetric) analysis of the spectral composition of colors;
• Chemical detection of chemical erasures;
• Chemical spot reactions to check the organic and inorganic composition of document materials (paper, ink);
• Spectroscopic examination of organic compounds (polymers of synthetic documents, e.g. credit cards; identification of photocopy toners).
The methodology follows the general system of forensic examination and standard procedures for document-related examination, based mainly on the detection of irregularities or by comparing the questioned item with an authentic specimen. An absolute opinion on the authenticity of a questioned document may, however, not always be given, even after high technology examination, simply because the differences between the original and the suspected imitation are not conclusive. For example, the authentic document may be of poor (print) quality, or the highly dangerous forms of fraud and forgery are not known.
Comprehensive reference manuals and databases for highly protected security documents, particularly banknotes, passports and visas, try to keep updated collections of images from authentic documents, including close-up views and specifications of relevant security features. In addition document experts of immigration and forensic science services are networking information on detected counterfeits and forgeries. This is a valuable help for fast authenticity checking, mainly at the front line of inspection. For many other documents however, this type of reference material does not exist. This is also the case with documents that had been produced in such a variety of ‘official’ types, that it is no longer clear what should be considered authentic!
Another factor that is making the unambiguous identification of suspected questioned documents more and more difficult, is the improvement in office technology; these are also available for use in forgery and other criminal activities. Digital scanners and printers have reached a technology level able to produce documents, even security documents, of a quality standard, which makes it more and more difficult to differentiate between genuine and fake. This is particularly true for laser color copy technology with its almost unlimited software possibilities. However, combating color copy fraud is possible and technologies to prevent it are available. Either by programming the scanning software, to recognize automatically unauthorized reproduction, e.g. of banknotes and checks, or by printing on the copy a latent machine-readable code, which can lead via the manufacturer to the customer’s copy machine.
The detection of document counterfeits and forgery is a challenge not only to forensic sciences!

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