Fake Signature, Fake Contract – What They Are & How To Avoid Them
The rise of electronic signing platforms like jSign has made collecting signatures and organizing documents easy, paper-free, and minimally time consuming. Yet, when a fraudster decides to forge a signature or create a fake contract, all of these benefits get thrown out the window.
In fact, a fake signature or document could cost you a lot of money and potentially give you plenty of legal issues to deal with.
Because of this, you want to choose an e-signature solutions provider that equips you with the tools and resources that can help you avoid running into these problems.
jSign’s reliance on blockchain technology, audit trails, and other valuable features makes it one of your best choices on the market.
So can you fake a signature? What about creating a fake contract? How do you prove a signature is real? Keep reading this article to find the answers to these questions and more.
Can you fake a signature?
Yes, wrongdoers can unfortunately fake both signatures and contracts in many ways.
First of all, with a fake signature, a criminal could easily pretend to be someone else. In turn, they may open a new financial account under the victim’s name, access their personal information, and submit fake applications or documents.
One of the best strategies for avoiding this headache is to use an e-signature provider that has rigorous (but, at the same time, seamless) verification, authentication, and document-tracking tools, such as jSign.
Secondly, lawbreakers could partially or fully alter a document to create a fake contract. If you’re a customer, you might receive a fake contract from a fraudulent sender that’s pretending to be a legitimate business.
Similarly, if you’re an organization or business, hackers may make minor changes to your customer agreements. These modifications tend to have hefty financial and legal consequences, even if it takes you a long time to notice them.
As a matter of fact, this is among the reasons why jSign relies on QR code technology. Scanning a contract or agreement’s QR code enables you to accurately track the document and know whether someone tampered with it.
What a Fake Signature and Fake Contract Look Like
Fake signatures and contracts can come in different forms. Here are the main types:
- Wet Signatures: A wet signature is the one that you physically provide by signing a piece of paper. Fraudsters might attempt to copy a victim’s wet signature or come up with a new (and entirely fake) one.
- Online Signatures: Wrongdoers could electronically type in a person’s signature or draw it on a touchpad. From there, they falsely pretend to be the signatory in order to engage in various illegal activities.
- Contracts: Since it’s nearly impossible to get away with manually altering a typed paper contract, legal offenders typically resort to electronic methods for doing so. To create a fake contract, criminals may make changes to a document before you send it to a customer or client, while you wait for it to be signed, or after the recipient signs and sends it back to you.
Thankfully, there are e-signature solutions providers that have a variety of tools that can help prevent these problems.
Among the best examples is jSign, particularly because it utilizes blockchain, detailed document tracking and time-stamping features, QR codes, and location restrictions for signatories.
What is it called to fake a signature?
Creating a fake signature or fake contract is called forgery. Regardless of its form, forgery is a crime that has a lot of legal consequences.
Offenders who forge a signature and/or contract are violating two federal laws: The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC).
When it comes to online files, you want to work with an electronic signature provider whose forms and documents abide by these acts’ requirements, such as jSign.
This is important because the UETA and UCC define what it means to forge a signature and contract, and they specify what’s considered as legally-accepted evidence for forgery.
How do you prove a signature is real?
With jSign, account holders can access a variety of tools that help them identify forgery.
Here are some of the main advantages that jSign offers:
Audit Trails
After you send out a document and collect the signatures that you need, jSign’s audit trails tools will let you look at every action that was taken on your file, starting from when it was originally created.
Additionally, you can see when and where the document was signed, the signature method, who viewed it, and if any attachments were uploaded.
Above all, each step and action is recorded and timestamped.
Blockchain Technology
Blockchain technology is another great feature that helps you avoid fake signatures and/or contracts.
With blockchain, every activity is recorded under a separate data block. Individual blocks are connected to the ones that recorded the previous and subsequent actions on your documents.
As a result, trying to forge a signature or tampering with blockchain-tracked files is difficult since all the data blocks are interconnected but, at the same time, stored in a decentralized manner. This makes it even harder to forge a signature or document.
Location Restrictions
Thanks to geo-location technology, jSign’s account holders can determine the recipient’s exact location and IP address when they sign a document.
Equally as important is that jSign users can restrict signatures to specific locations, which enables them to stay clear of fraud. This feature is also valuable to professionals in certain industries.
Certificate of Completion
Once you gather the needed signatures from your recipients, jSign allows you to obtain a Certificate of Completion that entails your document’s unique ID number, details about the file (such as the numbers of the pages and signatories), and comprehensive activity history.
Perhaps most noteworthy is that this Certificate of Completion may help you prove whether a signature is real or fake.
QR Code Technology
By simply scanning your document’s unique QR code, you could instantly view your document’s history and immediately identify fraud in the event that you suspect that someone tried to forge a signature.
Needless to say, jSign offers a host of other features that make it effortless and easy to send and receive documents, store files, collect signatures, and even create your own, unique online signature.
How do I make my own signature?
With jSign, making your own electronic signature is as easy and convenient as it gets, and there are four methods for doing so:
- Type: This is the quickest and most straightforward way. All you and/or your recipients have to do is type in your names into the document’s signature field.
- Draw: You can draw your signature online through your mouse or trackpad. You may also use your finger or stylus if you have a touch screen.
- Upload: Those who prefer to retain the style of their wet signature can simply take a picture of it, upload the image, and begin to sign files online.
- Via Sign Pad: jSign gives users the option to sign through an external signature pad.
Keep in mind that a unique and identifiable online signature makes it hard for criminals to forge a signature or impersonate you.
Ready to get started? Try jSign for free!
One of the best features that jSign offers is that you could try it out for free through our 14-day trial. After that, you can make a practical and informed decision on whether jSign is the right choice for your and your organization’s e-signature needs.
Click here to sign up for your 14-day free trial!
