Detect tampered and deepfake Articles of Incorporation

What genuine articles of incorporation contains

Articles of incorporation set out the company's name, its registered office, the purpose it is formed to pursue, and the share structure: the authorised capital, the classes of share, and the par value attaching to each. Below that sit the subscribers, the number of shares each one takes, the first directors, and the incorporator's signature. The registrar then adds the layer that gives the instrument force, which is a filing stamp carrying a date and a filing number, a certification on each page, and an endorsement or seal.

Those numbers are bound to one another. The shares taken up by the subscribers cannot exceed the authorised capital declared a few lines above them, and the registrar's filing number is allocated in sequence, so its format carries its own date. A company cannot be dated earlier than the filing that created it, and the registration number printed on the articles has to be the number on the certificate of incorporation issued alongside them. Rewrite the share structure and the arithmetic beneath it stops agreeing.

How articles of incorporation forgeries are made

• Registrar endorsement fabrication

  The filing stamp and registrar's seal are lifted from a genuine filing and placed onto a template. A pasted endorsement sits on the page rather than in it: the edges are cleaner than the print around them, the compression history differs, and nothing deforms the paper where an embossed seal would.

• Share clause rewriting

  The authorised capital or the share classes are rewritten so a shell reads as substantially funded, or so the subscriber holding the controlling stake disappears behind a nominee. The replacement paragraph seldom matches the line spacing, justification, and hyphenation of the clauses on either side of it.

• Backdated formation

  The filing date is moved earlier to give a company formed last month the trading history a lender or a marketplace requires. The altered date then contradicts the sequence its filing number belongs to, and often the creation timestamp buried in the file it was edited in.

• Identity swap onto a genuine filing

  A real set of articles belonging to a company in good standing is reused with the name and registration number replaced. The forger borrows another entity's standing rather than inventing one, which is why the page survives a visual review and fails a per-field comparison.

• Subscriber signature transplant

  Signatures are cut from another document and dropped onto the execution page. Resampled ink has a different sharpness profile from the page it now sits on, and the stroke edges carry compression artefacts that genuine pen ink scanned at the same time does not.

• Formation packs produced by a model

  Whole documents drafted end to end rather than edited, so every clause agrees with every other and cross-checks find nothing. These separate out through generation signatures and through the way synthetic paper and print behave under noise and compression analysis.

What TamperCheck checks on articles of incorporation

TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks across three layers and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 with plain-English findings tied to specific regions of the document. These three carry the most weight on this document class.

• Embossed seal analysis

  A physically embossed seal deforms the paper it sits on. A seal that was scanned and reprinted is flat, and the two separate cleanly under analysis even when they are hard to tell apart by eye.

• Stamp authenticity and placement

  Stamps are assessed for whether the ink was impressed onto the page or printed as part of it, and for whether the impression was placed digitally after the fact.

• Signature forgery analysis

  Signature regions are assessed for ink consistency and for how the stroke sits on the page, which distinguishes a genuine pen stroke from a pasted image of one.

• And many more checks

  The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on articles of incorporation. Every upload runs the full suite of 200+ checks regardless of document class, spanning file structure and metadata, pixel-level forensics, font and text rendering, optical and print characteristics, provenance signals, AI-generation signatures, and many more checks.

Who verifies articles of incorporation, and why

Banks and fintechs running KYB checks during business onboarding. In each case the document is being used to unlock money, access, or a legal status, which is exactly what makes it worth forging.

How to verify articles of incorporation in 4 steps

1. 1

   Check the fields against each other

   Read company name, registration number, and share structure together rather than one at a time. Forgers typically change one value and leave the rest of the document describing the original.

2. 2

   Inspect the file metadata

   Open the document properties and look at the producer, creation date, and modification date. A document produced by a consumer PDF editor, or created long after the date printed on its face, is worth a closer look.

3. 3

   Ask for a second document

   Request a corroborating document from the same issuer or an adjacent period. Forgery effort concentrates on one file, so inconsistencies surface as soon as there are two to compare.

4. 4

   Run a forensic check

   Manual review catches obvious edits but not field-level pixel manipulation or synthetic generation. TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks on articles of incorporation and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 within seconds, at $0.50 per document.

Frequently asked questions