# Detect tampered and deepfake ID Card > Most fake ID cards are caught in a photograph rather than in the hand. An onboarding team never touches the card. It receives an upload, so the hologram cannot be tilted, the laminate cannot be felt, and the only evidence left is whatever the image preserved. That is where a substituted face, a re-rendered date of birth, or a hologram printed flat onto the card surface starts to show. TamperCheck analyses the upload for precisely those signals. **Canonical URL:** https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/id_card **API document class:** `id_card` **Last updated:** 2026-10-07 --- ## What a genuine ID card contains An identity card compresses a person into about a dozen printed fields on a credit-card-sized piece of polycarbonate: surname, given names, date of birth, sex, nationality, a document number in the issuer's own format, dates of issue and expiry, the issuing authority, a portrait, and usually a signature. The reverse carries an address or a machine-readable line, and many cards embed a contactless chip. Under all of it runs a guilloche background and microprint, with a hologram laminated over the portrait and data. None of those fields stands alone. The document number follows a published structure, the expiry date sits a fixed term after the issue date rather than an arbitrary distance, and every printed character on the card came from one print head in one pass, so weight, spacing, and baseline are uniform across it. The hologram is laminated above that print, which means it interacts with the portrait and the text beneath. Replace a single field and it stops matching the run it belongs to. ## How ID card forgeries are made ### Portrait swap under the laminate A new face is dropped into the photo zone of a scanned card. The hologram and laminate that should sit over the portrait are either absent across the replaced area or copied above it as a flat graphic, and the inserted face rarely matches the card for resolution, grain, and white balance. ### Date of birth rework A birth date is retyped so the holder clears an age or eligibility rule. The replacement digits are set in a font matched by eye rather than lifted from the card, which leaves them sitting slightly off the baseline shared by the fields around them and rendered with edges the original printing never produced. ### Document number edits The card number is changed to fit a record the applicant wants to match, or to escape one already refused. Issuers use fixed number structures, so invented values tend to break the pattern with the wrong length, a prefix never assigned, or a serial that disagrees with the issue date printed beside it. ### Hologram simulation A hologram printed onto the card rather than laminated above it convinces in one still image and fails in every other. It does not occlude the text beneath, it holds identical colours at every angle, and its edges are as crisp as the ordinary printing surrounding it. ### Print-to-order template cards Whole cards are produced from a reconstructed template carrying the buyer's own photograph and details. Nothing was edited, so field comparison finds no inconsistency. The tells are in manufacture: consumer inkjet dot patterns where a genuine card is dye-sublimated, and microprint that dissolves into grey at magnification. ### Screen and print recapture The card presented is a photograph of a monitor or a printout of a scan, which lets an already edited image pass as a live capture. Re-photographing stacks a second compression pass over the first and leaves moire interference or a lighting gradient belonging to the room rather than the card. ## What TamperCheck checks on an ID card 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. ### Portrait substitution and face-swap analysis The document is isolated from whatever it was photographed on, then the portrait region is assessed against the card surface around it. A pasted or generated face rarely matches the substrate it was placed onto. ### Security print, foil, and hologram analysis A genuine security overlay or guilloche background behaves differently from a printed picture of one. A reproduction loses the structure that made the feature a security feature in the first place, and that loss is measurable even when the copy looks convincing on screen. ### Reference and document number checks Document, account, and reference numbers are checked for issuer format conformance and against every other place the same value appears on the page. ### And many more checks The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on an ID card. 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 ID card, and why KYC and onboarding teams confirming citizenship or residency. 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 ID card in 4 steps 1. **Check the fields against each other.** Read portrait photo, date of birth, and document number together rather than one at a time. Forgers typically change one value and leave the rest of the document describing the original. 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. **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. **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 ID card and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 within seconds, at $0.50 per document. ## Frequently asked questions ### How do I detect a fake ID card? Work through the card's internal consistency first: whether the document number matches the issuer's format, whether the expiry sits the correct term after issue, and whether every field shares one font, weight, and baseline. Then look at the portrait boundary and the hologram, since a substituted face interrupts the laminate pattern and a copied hologram holds one appearance at every angle. ### What software checks if an ID is real? TamperCheck analyses identity cards through a single REST endpoint. Send a scan or a phone photo and it returns a JSON verdict with a risk score from 0 to 100 and findings tied to specific regions of the card, so a flagged result points at the field that moved rather than at the document as a whole. It costs $0.50 per document with no subscription or minimum. ### Can AI create a fake ID that passes KYC? It can pass any check that only reads the card's contents, because a generated card is built consistent from the start and has no edit to find. It fails at the imaging layer instead: no print pass, no lamination depth, no camera or scanner in the file's history, and a fine-line background that was drawn rather than pressed into a substrate. ### Why do ID checks fail on a phone photo? Because a phone photo discards most of what an identity card was engineered to prove. Optically variable features need movement, microprint needs resolution, and the laminate needs raking light. When the card is only ever an upload, verification has to shift onto the signals a single frame does retain: print structure, field-level consistency, and the compression history of the image. ## Related document types - Passport: https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/passport - National ID: https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/national_id - Driver's License: https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/drivers_license - Voter ID: https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/voter_id - Social Security Card: https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/social_security_card - Photograph: https://tampercheck.ai/documents-support/photograph --- Try TamperCheck now: https://tampercheck.ai/dashboard · Docs: https://tampercheck.ai/docs · Pricing: https://tampercheck.ai/pricing