Is this travel agency booking real? Check for edits and AI fakes

How travel agency booking forgeries are made

1. Traveller names added to a live tour

   Names are inserted into the passenger list of a genuine group booking the applicant has no part in. The added line sits in the same table as the real travellers but rarely matches their kerning or row height, and the headcount stops agreeing with the total price printed underneath.

2. Licence and accreditation numbers invented

   The agency's licence or IATA number is fabricated, or copied from a competitor's website. These numbers follow fixed national and industry formats, so an invented one tends to be the right shape and the wrong value, or to belong to a company other than the one on the letterhead.

3. Date extension across the package

   Departure and return dates are pushed out to justify a longer stay, but the day-by-day programme is not rebuilt to match. The document then promises eleven days of touring inside a fourteen-day window, with hotel nights that stop short of the return flight.

4. Cancelled vouchers kept in circulation

   The voucher is genuine and was genuinely issued, then cancelled and refunded once the appointment was over. Nothing on the page has been altered, so the document is authentic and the booking is not, which is why consulates ask agencies to confirm status rather than trusting the paper.

5. Stamp and signature reproduction

   The authorised signature and round agency stamp are scanned from one voucher and applied to others. The pair travels together at a fixed offset, appears at identical rotation on every copy, and lies flat on top of the text instead of overprinting it the way wet ink does.

6. Agencies that exist only on paper

   A trading name, a logo, an address and a voucher template assembled in an afternoon, with a website behind them where the operation is organised. The documents are internally faultless, so they are assessed on generation signatures and on whether the agency answers at the contact details it prints.

Frequently asked questions

What a genuine travel agency booking contains

A confirmation from an agency carries the trading name, address, telephone and licence or IATA accreditation number, and a voucher number in the agency's own sequence. It names each traveller as the passport spells them, the package or tour name, the departure and return dates, and the day-by-day programme: cities, nights in each, transfers, excursions and the hotels with their street addresses. Below that sit the inclusions and exclusions, the price per person and the total, the payment status, and an authorised signature over the company stamp.

The programme is what holds the rest of the document honest. Nights in the itinerary have to equal nights in the hotel list, which have to cover every date between arrival and departure, including the ones spent moving between cities. The country of first entry and the country of longest stay decide which consulate should be receiving the application at all, so a rearranged itinerary changes the answer to that question. Price per person multiplied by the traveller count is the total, and the payment status has to match the receipt filed behind it.

Red flags in a travel agency booking

• Travel dates that break the chronology

  Lay the travel dates against every other date on the document and against when the file says it was created. Backdated and extended dates tend to land in an order no real issuing system would have produced.

• Traveller names that are set in a slightly different hand

  Zoom in on the traveller names and compare weight, spacing and edge sharpness with the lines above and below it. A substituted value is rarely typeset exactly like the original, even when the typeface name matches.

• Sender details that cannot be reached

  Invitation and sponsor letters should be reachable through an independently found address or number, not just the ones printed on the page.

• Templates shared across unrelated applicants

  Itineraries, bookings and invitations built from the same template turn up across applications. Compare against previous submissions.

• A booking reference that does not exist at the supplier

  Check the reference with the airline, hotel or agency directly. A convincing layout with a reference no one recognises is a classic fake.

How to verify a travel agency booking in 4 steps

1. 1. Check the fields against each other

   Read travel dates, traveller names, and agency licence number 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 travel agency booking and returns a risk score from 0 to 100 within seconds, on published per-document pricing.

What TamperCheck checks on a travel agency booking

• 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.

• Letterhead, logo, and issuer plausibility

  Issuer branding is checked for resolution and compression consistency against the body text it sits on. A logo lifted from a website carries the signature of its source, not of the document.

• And many more checks

  The three above are the layers that carry the most weight on a travel agency booking. 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.