Detect tampered and deepfake Professional License

What a genuine professional license contains

A practising licence identifies a registrant and the limits on what they may do. It carries the registrant's full name, the registration or licence number in the board's own format, the profession and the class or category of registration, the practice scope or specialty endorsements, the qualification the registration rests on, the date of first registration, the current issue date, and the expiry or renewal date. Any conditions, restrictions, or supervision requirements print alongside them, together with the regulator's name, its seal, and often a hologram or foil element.

The number and the dates constrain one another. Licence numbers follow a fixed format for the board that issued them and frequently encode the register or the year of first registration, so a number in the wrong pattern is wrong regardless of whose name sits beside it. Renewal cycles are fixed too, which makes the gap between issue and expiry one of a small set of intervals. The conditions line carries the safety value: a restriction deleted leaves a licence that reads as unrestricted while the regulator's own record says otherwise.

How professional license forgeries are made

• Registration number substitution

  A number belonging to a genuine, currently registered practitioner is attached to someone else's name, so a lookup done by number returns a real and active licence. This is the most dangerous version in the family, because it survives exactly the check most employers actually perform.

• Expiry extended on a lapsed or suspended licence

  The renewal date is advanced so a registration that has run out, or been suspended pending a disciplinary outcome, continues to read as current. The registrant was once legitimately licensed, so every other field on the card is authentic and consistent.

• Class or scope upgraded

  The category is raised: licensed practical nurse to registered nurse, engineering technician to chartered engineer, restricted registration to unrestricted. The change is a few characters and it widens what the holder claims to be entitled to do by a considerable margin.

• Conditions and restrictions deleted

  Supervision requirements, practice limitations, or endorsement exclusions are removed from the licence, which is the edit that matters most for patient and public safety. Deleting the conditions block leaves white space the original layout did not have, and the remaining fields often shift to fill it.

• Seal or hologram composited onto the scan

  The regulator's seal or holographic foil is pasted over a digital copy rather than being present on a physical card. A composited hologram shows a single fixed colour state and no interaction with the card's surface texture, where a real one varies across the image as the light does.

• Cards produced to order

  Whole licences are manufactured for professions in demand, complete with plausible numbers, dates, and scope. Because every field was fabricated together, nothing internal contradicts anything else, and separating them relies on print and substrate analysis plus a register lookup by both name and number.

What TamperCheck checks on a professional license

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.

• 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.

• 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.

• And many more checks

  The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on a professional license. 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 professional license, and why

Healthcare, engineering, and legal employers plus regulatory boards. 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 professional license in 4 steps

1. 1

   Look the number up on the regulator's public register

   Search the issuing board's register by licence number, then search it again by the registrant's name. Both searches must return the same person, the same class of registration, and the same expiry. A number that resolves to someone else is a substitution.

2. 2

   Check the number format and the renewal interval

   Confirm the licence number follows the pattern that board issues, including any prefix denoting the register or profession, and that the gap between issue and expiry matches the board's renewal cycle rather than an arbitrary span.

3. 3

   Read the conditions line against the register entry

   Compare any restrictions, supervision requirements, or scope endorsements on the card with what the register records. A card showing unrestricted practice against a register entry carrying conditions is the discrepancy with the greatest safety consequence.

4. 4

   Analyse the card itself

   Register lookups confirm that a licence exists, not that the document in front of you is the one issued. TamperCheck analyses the card or its scan against 200+ forensic checks and reports which region was altered, at $0.50 per document with no minimum.

Frequently asked questions