Supported document type
Detect tampered and deepfake Experience Letter
A fake experience letter certifies employment that never happened, or stretches eight months into the three years a job advert asks for. It is the easiest document in a hiring file to invent, because nobody maintains a register of past employment: there is only a letterhead, a tenure range, a designation and an HR signature, each set to whatever the candidate needs. What cannot be set is the file's own history, and that is what TamperCheck reads.
API slug: experience_letter
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What a genuine experience letter contains
An experience letter is issued on the former employer's letterhead and carries the registered address, a reference number and a date of issue. It names the employee and their employee ID, the designation or designations held, the department, and the exact dates of service from joining to last working day. Most add a short account of responsibilities, the reporting line, a closing remark on conduct, and the signatory's name, title and contact details, under a company seal.
Those fields hold each other in place. A letter cannot be dated before the last working day it certifies. A designation has to fit the tenure printed beneath it, since a two-year stint rarely ends at a title that takes ten years to reach, and it has to match the duties described in the paragraph below it. The employee ID follows the company's own format, the reference number follows its own sequence, and the signatory has to be someone with authority to certify service.
How experience letter forgeries are made
Tenure extension
The joining date is moved earlier or the last working day later, usually to bridge a gap in a CV or to clear a minimum-experience bar written into a job specification. Two dates change and everything else on the letter is genuine, so the document reads correctly while its own compression history does not.
Designation uplift
The job title is raised a grade or two, from executive to manager or from engineer to lead, without the dates or the duties paragraph being touched. The edited title then sits directly above a description of work that nobody at that grade would be doing.
Letterhead rebuilt from a website
A logo is pulled at screen resolution from the employer's public site and dropped into a word processor template. The header that results carries resampling artefacts at the edges of the mark and slightly wrong brand colours, above body text that never shared a print run with it.
Signature lifted from another document
A genuine HR signature is cropped out of an offer letter or a payslip and pasted in. It arrives with a hard boundary, a background tone that does not match the paper around it, and pixel-level similarity to the same signature on the other document in the same candidate file.
A company that will vouch for anyone
The letter comes from a business set up to supply employment history, or from a real one that never employed the candidate. Nothing has been edited, so per-field comparison finds nothing, and what a screener is left with is the production quality of the letterhead and a verification contact that does not belong to the company.
Template letters produced in bulk
Sample experience letters circulate as editable files, and a generated one fills the same skeleton with a different name and employer each time. Every field is internally consistent, so cross-checks pass. What separates these is the document's generation history and the absence of any print-and-scan stage.
What TamperCheck checks on an experience letter
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.
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.
Letterhead, logo, and issuer plausibility
Issuer branding is checked for resolution and compression consistency against the body text it sits on. A logo lifted from a website carries the signature of its source, not of the document.
Date and validity consistency
Issue, expiry, and period dates are checked against one another and against the file's own creation metadata, which catches backdating and validity extension.
And many more checks
The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on an experience letter. 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 an experience letter, and why
Background screening firms and recruiters validating work history. 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 an experience letter in 4 steps
Check the fields against each other
Read tenure dates, job title, and company letterhead together rather than one at a time. Forgers typically change one value and leave the rest of the document describing the original.
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.
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.
Run a forensic check
Manual review catches obvious edits but not field-level pixel manipulation or synthetic generation. TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks on an experience letter and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 within seconds, at $0.50 per document.
Frequently asked questions
How do employers verify an experience letter?
Employers verify an experience letter by going around it: they call the former employer on a number sourced independently rather than the one printed on the letter, and ask HR to confirm the dates and the title. Most large organisations route this through a background screening firm. The letter is then examined separately, because a confirming phone call and an unedited document are two different findings.
How common are fake experience letters?
Common enough that background verification is a standard, separately contracted step in hiring across most of the industry, which is the honest answer: published prevalence figures vary so widely by market and sector that quoting one would mislead. What is consistent is the incentive. Experience is the one claim on a CV with no public register behind it, and the letter supporting it costs nothing to produce.
Can a fake experience letter be detected without contacting the employer?
Yes. An edited tenure date or an inserted job title leaves the altered region with a different compression and rendering history than the text surrounding it, and a pasted signature carries the edges of the crop it came from. TamperCheck runs 200+ forensic checks on the file and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 with findings tied to specific regions, within seconds.
What software detects fake experience letters?
TamperCheck checks experience letters through one REST endpoint: send a PDF, scan or phone photo and get back a JSON verdict that names the field which was edited. It costs $0.50 per document with no subscription and no minimum, and files are processed ephemerally rather than stored. It analyses the document it is given; there is no employment register for it to query, because none exists.
TamperCheck analyses experience letter uploads with a hybrid forensic and AI pipeline tuned for this document class. Upload endpoints accept PDF and common image formats; class is inferred automatically. See the API & MCP documentation for authentication, async jobs, and webhooks.