Posted by 1317 2 days ago
PDFs are meant to be a presentation document format, not an editable document format. I have some experience editing PDFs, and it's difficult to make significant modifications. Editing small sections of text or replacing a date is fine, but once you try to start editing entire paragraphs or changing the layout, it quickly becomes unmanageable. The kerning looks weird, the spacing between words looks off, and when you look into it you realize the the sentence you're trying to edit is actually split across a dozen text objects. For these it becomes almost impossible to edit without destroying the spacing, so you just give up.
And the approved way to edit these PDFs is via Adobe Acrobat Pro, which costs $20/month (ugh), which I'm not willing to pay for.
So I think this is why we just don't see that many PDF forgeries. The editing tools just aren't very good. Maybe it's different now we can just ask Claude to edit our PDFs for us.
Inkscape is a pretty good tool to edit .pdfs
when you import a regular .pdf, it needs to convert it once, and once saved, you can edit the pdf and work on it as if it was a regular .svg
if you choose to embed the fonts when saving, .pdf files becomes easy to work on, you don't even need to export them.
Even generating them on the fly can be a real pain. I had a workflow when I was out of work to auto-generate a CV based upon re-writing sections to match the spec. So I'd have pre-written blocks and slot them in. And yet, somehow, even then it would break formatting all over the place.
[1] https://www.fincen.gov/mortgage-loan-fraud
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/licensed-mortgage-loan-...
and all those things listed wouldn’t be prosecuted, as long as you don’t touch mortgages
I would say KYC in general is a joke and nobody cares, as long as FinCEN and the DOJ believe KYC is working. But as far as the peddling of forged PDF’s go, very common, just not at the point of where the more damaging crime occurs ….. except in mortgage fraud, where that crime explicitly considers the fake employment letter to be the crime
Some software rewrap the page into say additional XObject, some add unique elements, some change one IDs but not the others.
I had a great blog post about it but can't find it right now. Will post if find the link.
1. General public don't read papers.
2. General public have lowered trust to them.
3. It's not impossible to produce and publish genuine paper with forged data.
If you want to forge a PDF, you do it because you have a private target in mind. Financial fraud, corporate espionage... There are other settings but people don't just share PDFs around for you to see a deluge of fake ones.
Students giving out free Microsoft licenses they could access through their University to people they knew was a thing, because Microsoft activation hacks had all kinds of problems.
Not like altering lines or anything material (I can already imagine the breathless replies being typed about how it's "antisocial" if someone's deck doesn't meet setbacks by 1ft or something) but changing text to remove references that would indicate other survey work was done that they don't wanna submit to public record, changing a labeled distance by a couple feet to make something that already exists technically compliant.
Like with everything else it's the little guys sticking their necks out. The big guys can afford good surveyors who "get it" and don't need to be told when a difference within the bounds of measurement error and will have four or five figure implications or that a survey result is so unfavorable that they should just call the client, bill whatever they would have charged as a consulting fee and not screw their client with the liability of a paper trail.
> (In the rare cases anyone tampers with PDFs, it quickly turns into a technical morass and he-said-she-said, and requires several orders of magnitude more effort to prove than to do; consider the hoops epxperts had to jump through in the Craig Wright cases, or even just a landlord editing a contract—where the contract was done through a digital document timestamping service!)
Specifically "epxperts"
The Dieselgate is a good analogy. Incentives, how easy it is to get to profit.