Document Forensics
Whilst electronic documents and e-mails have proliferated in the modern office, physical documents, printouts and hard copies should never be overlooked when seeking evidence of wrongdoing. In cases of identity theft, forgery, counterfeiting and fraud, the forensic investigation of documents, inks, paper and handwriting has often been pivotal.
Haymarket is regularly retained to identify alterations, to determine forgery and to establish the true authorship of a document. There are several sophisticated tests which can also be applied to show links between documents such as common authorship or provenance, and even the sequence in which they were prepared.
A client received an anonymous threat letter. To protect his identity, the author had cut words from a newspaper and stuck them onto a blank sheet of paper. However, a forensic test revealed impressions of a previous letter that had been written above the blank sheet. Follow up enquiries based on that information, led to the identification and subsequent arrest of the “anonymous” author.