Detect tampered and deepfake Registration Certificate

What a genuine registration certificate contains

A registration certificate names the registering authority and the statute it acts under, the registration number in that authority's format, the registered entity and its class of registration, the registered address, the date of registration, and the date the certificate was issued. Depending on the register it will list office bearers, trustees, or the proprietor, any validity or renewal date, and the conditions attaching to the registration. It closes with the signature and designation of the authorised officer and the authority's seal, usually embossed. Where the certificate registers a vehicle, the chassis and engine numbers and the owner's particulars appear instead.

The registration number is the field that has to agree with everything else. Its format normally encodes the authority, the district or office, and the year, so it cannot sit alongside a registration date from a different year or an office in another district. The issue date follows the registration date, renewal terms run a fixed length, and on a vehicle certificate the chassis and engine numbers have to correspond to the vehicle they are claimed for. An invented number brings none of that structure with it.

How registration certificate forgeries are made

• Invented registration numbers

  A number is made up in roughly the right shape for the authority named on the certificate. Registers allocate numbers with an internal structure, so an invented one tends to encode a district or a year that contradicts the office and the date printed elsewhere on the same certificate.

• Borrowed registration, replaced name

  A real certificate belonging to a registered society or enterprise is reused with the name replaced, borrowing a registration that genuinely exists. The replaced name is the only altered region on an otherwise authentic page, which is precisely what per-field analysis is designed to isolate.

• Issue and validity date edits

  Dates are moved so a registration appears current or appears older than it is, depending on whether the certificate is being used to claim standing or to satisfy a renewal requirement. Edited digits rarely carry the same rendering as the digits either side of them.

• Office bearer and owner particulars swapped

  The trustees, office bearers, or registered owner are rewritten so control of the registered entity appears to sit with whoever is presenting the certificate. On vehicle registration certificates this is the change that lets someone sell or finance an asset they have no title to.

• Flattened authority seal

  An embossed seal is scanned and reprinted onto a new certificate. The relief disappears and the shading that a real impression creates becomes a fixed part of the image, unchanging regardless of how the document is lit or angled when it is photographed.

• Certificates for obscure authorities

  The more local or specialised the register, the less likely a reviewer has seen its certificate. Fabrications aimed at those registers are checked on their print and paper characteristics and on the internal consistency of the number, because there is no reference layout to compare against.

What TamperCheck checks on a registration certificate

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.

• 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.

• 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 a registration certificate. 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 registration certificate, and why

Government bodies and partners confirming lawful registration. 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 registration certificate in 4 steps

1. 1

   Check the fields against each other

   Read registration number, registered entity name, and issue date 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 registration certificate and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 within seconds, at $0.50 per document.

Frequently asked questions