Detect tampered and deepfake Note Verbale

What a genuine note verbale contains

A note verbale is issued on the letterhead of a ministry, embassy or international organisation and opens by naming sender and addressee in the third person. It carries a note reference in the issuing body's own sequence, the place and date, and then the substance: the traveller's full name, title or rank, passport type and number, the purpose of the journey, the period and the places of stay, and the meeting or invitation it responds to. It closes with the standard courtesy formula, the drafting officer's initials rather than a signature, and the embossed or inked seal.

Authentication rests on the letterhead, the reference and the seal, so all three have to agree with each other. The reference follows the ministry's format and usually encodes a department and a year, which should be consistent with the date beneath it. The note should address the receiving mission by the form used in diplomatic correspondence. Diplomatic and service passports run in their own number series, distinct from ordinary passports, and any delegation listed in the note should be the delegation named in the invitation the note cites.

How note verbale forgeries are made

• Names added to a delegation list

  A genuine note covering a delegation is extended with extra names, selling official travel status to people with no part in it. The added rows disturb the alignment of the list, and the headcount stated in the body stops matching the names printed underneath it.

• Ministry letterhead copied from published notes

  Ministries publish notes and circulars, so their letterheads circulate freely as high-resolution files. The copied crest then carries the compression history of whatever document it came from, and it tends to sit a fraction of a millimetre off the position it occupies on genuine stationery.

• A signature added at the foot

  Forgers sign notes verbales, because an unsigned letter looks unfinished to anyone unfamiliar with the form. Practice is initials and a seal, so a full handwritten signature is out of place before the ink is examined at all, and it is one of the few tells visible without any tooling.

• Reference number invented

  The note reference is typed to resemble a ministry sequence without following one. Departments, year segments and serial ranges are stable within a ministry, so a fabricated reference tends to place a routine note in a department that does not issue them, or in a year contradicting the note's own date.

• Seal reproduction

  The embossed or inked seal is scanned and reapplied. A dry seal leaves relief in the paper that survives no copy, and an inked one overlays the text it crosses with density that varies across the impression. The reproduced version is uniform and sits on top of everything beneath it.

• Purpose and period rewritten

  The period of stay or the purpose of the journey is edited on an authentic note, so official status extends past the meeting it was issued for. The substituted dates usually run beyond the validity of the invitation the note itself cites two lines earlier.

What TamperCheck checks on a note verbale

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.

• 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 a note verbale. 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 note verbale, and why

Consulates processing official and diplomatic visa applications. 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 note verbale in 4 steps

1. 1

   Check the fields against each other

   Read delegation member details, travel purpose and dates, and ministry letterhead 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 note verbale and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 in about a minute, at $0.50 per document.

Frequently asked questions