Detect tampered and deepfake Letter of Intent

What a genuine letter of intent contains

A letter of intent names both parties by their legal entities rather than their trading names, identifies the subject precisely - the asset, the property, the programme, the role - and states the headline consideration or valuation. It sets out key dates: the date of issue, any exclusivity or standstill period, and a deadline for acceptance. Conditions precedent follow, typically due diligence, financing, or board approval, along with a clause stating which provisions are binding and which are not. Each side signs through an authorised signatory whose name and title appear beneath the signature.

The binding clause governs what the rest of the letter is worth, so it has to be read against the confidentiality, exclusivity, and cost provisions it carves out. The consideration normally appears more than once, as a headline figure and again inside a payment or structure paragraph, sometimes in words as well as numerals. Acceptance and exclusivity deadlines count forward from the issue date, so moving that date moves both. The signatory's title has to carry authority to bind the entity named at the top, not a related company.

How letter of intent forgeries are made

• Valuation and consideration edits

  The headline number is raised to create leverage with a third party or a competing bidder. Because the figure is repeated in the structure paragraph and often written out in words, changing it in one place leaves a letter that offers two different amounts for the same asset.

• Entity substitution

  The counterparty is renamed as a better-known company or a group parent, turning an offer from a small buyer into one that appears institutionally backed. The substituted name usually sits at a different tracking or weight from the surrounding text, and it contradicts the signatory block further down the page.

• Signatory and title upgrade

  The person signing is elevated to a title carrying authority they do not hold, so a letter signed by an analyst reads as signed by a managing director. This costs the forger a single line and transforms how the recipient weighs the document, which is why the title line deserves as much scrutiny as the signature above it.

• Issue and expiry date changes

  The date is moved to revive a letter whose acceptance window closed, or to make an expired exclusivity period look live. Everything downstream is computed from that date, so the deadline stated in the body frequently stops matching the date printed at the top once one of them is edited.

• Conditions quietly removed

  A condition precedent, a financing contingency, or the sentence establishing that the letter is non-binding is deleted so a preliminary document reads as a commitment. Removing a line reflows the paragraph beneath it, leaving spacing and justification that no longer match the rest of the letter.

• Letters produced without a counterparty

  Nobody on the other side ever wrote it. Drafted or generated against a real company's letterhead, the letter is coherent throughout and defeats a read-through entirely. It is exposed by the letterhead and signature instead: a logo at the wrong resolution, and a signature that carries none of the artefacts a real capture leaves.

What TamperCheck checks on a letter of intent

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.

• 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.

• Field-level forensics

  Every text region is analysed in its own right rather than as part of one whole-page image. This catches the smoothed and feathered edits that whole-image Error Level Analysis misses entirely.

• And many more checks

  The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on a letter of intent. 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 a letter of intent, and why

Deal teams, property agents, and admissions offices acting on preliminary terms. 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 a letter of intent in 4 steps

1. 1

   Check the fields against each other

   Read proposed terms and valuation, party names, and signature block 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 a letter of intent and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 in about a minute, at $0.50 per document.

Frequently asked questions