Forgery in The Home Office

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt

The trail of bogus checks led across three Southern states, from a few that were passed in Louisiana, to a flood of nearly 100 that turned up in Tuscaloosa, Ala. They totaled in the tens of thousands of dollars, and all were tracked down to one place: a private home in Vicksburg, Miss. There, police discovered a trove of high-tech gear that included a document scanner, a laser printer, an IBM-compatible computer and a disk filled with digitized checks, drivers' licenses and department store IDs. "The guy could copy anything he wanted," says Detective Reggie McCann of the Jackson, Miss., police. "It blew our minds."

That counterfeit case, which is pending in two state courts, may be the most elaborate and costly example yet of a new form of fraud: desktop forgery. Using the methods of desktop publishing -- the technology by which professional-looking publications are prepared on inexpensive personal computers -- desktop forgers can cheaply and easily create official documents that are virtually indistinguishable from the real thing.

"There has always been forgery," says Paul Brainerd, president of the Seattle software firm Aldus Corp. and the man who coined the term desktop publishing. "We have just lowered the cost of entry."

The technique is remarkably simple. First, the forger uses an optical scanner to turn a legitimate document into a digital image stored in the computer's memory. Then, using a so-called paint program, which is an electronic version of an artist's drawing kit, he alters the image to suit his purposes -- adding zeros to the dollar amount, say, or deleting the payee's name and substituting his own. Finally, the altered document is printed out on a laser printer or, for best results, on a professional typesetting machine.

"It's a golden opportunity for criminals," says James Cavuoto, editor of Micro Publishing Report, based in Torrance, Calif., and author of a new study that describes the scope of the problem and offers tips for detection. According to Cavuoto, desktop forgers can doctor a wide range of documents: passports, birth certificates, immigration cards, stock certificates, credit- card receipts, purchase orders, drug prescriptions and letters of reference. Academic transcripts are particularly susceptible because college students have easy access to the necessary equipment.

There are plenty of ways to defeat the desktop forger. The Standard Register company in Dayton, for example, sells a complete line of aids, from artificial watermarks that can be seen from an angle but are invisible to document scanners, to specially treated paper stock that, when tampered with, displays the word VOID in English, Spanish and Latin. But the counterfeiters do not seem daunted. A man in Boston used computer-faked checks and purchase orders to buy computer equipment. A couple in Phoenix made the rounds of the local liquor stores and check-cashing agencies with phony paychecks stamped with a variety of corporate logos. And late last year political activists in California distributed some 2,500 copies of the Los Angeles Times wrapped with a fake front page. One "article" criticized U.S. involvement in El Salvador, and another column apologized for the Times's news coverage of events there.