What is a specimen of writing made or prepared deliberately by altering usual or normal habits of his writing in the hope of hiding his identity?

Forgery

Forgery is the process of creating, adapting, or imitating objects or documents. The most common forgeries include money, works of art, documents, diplomas, and identification. Forgeries often accompany other fraud such as application, insurance, or check fraud, financial identity takeover, and so forth. In a less traditional sense, forgeries do not have to be physical but may also be electronic, such as fake personal pages on social media Web sites or adaption of e-mail correspondence. Concerning documents and identification, there are several types of forgery:

Blank documents are real documents, such as genuine passports without personal data or stamped and signed memorandum letters without content. The data are inserted by the forger to support fraudulent activity. As for passports and identification, they are usually obtained with the assistance of officials (police, ministry of interior, embassy, etc.) or stolen. This group of forged documents is difficult to detect.

Adjusted documents are documents that belonged to someone else but the data or picture in the documents has been changed to fit the carrier. These documents are often stolen from their real owners or bought (the owner is selling documents and then declaring them as missing). Documents that were deliberately damaged, such as those that were washed in a washing machine, belong to this group. Adjusting documents is the most common type of forgery.

Made documents are completely homemade to resemble real documents. Made documents can be privately made and are often of bad quality and easily detectable. However, documents can be made professionally by criminal organizations that invest huge amounts of money in sophisticated equipment. Also, certain states are known to make fake foreign documents for agents abroad. These documents are almost impossible to detect because they are of superb quality.

Borrowed documents are often used by illegal immigrants from Asian and African countries who are taking advantage of the fact that most Westerners cannot distinguish different Asian and African features. The forgers use unchanged documents belonging to someone else.

False documents—Several companies sell documents from countries that have ceased to exist although their names continue to sound familiar, such as Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, British Honduras, and Burma. With the passport, a client also receives identification cards, a country club membership card, a driving license, and so forth.

Before 1900

Forgery evolved along with the development of handwriting. Testimony for forensic document examiners began in the English-speaking courts with the case of Goodtitle d. Revett v. Braham in 1792 (Huber and Headrick, 1999). Two experts qualified to testify based on their experience as inspectors of franks (ibid). Expert testimony in questioned documents was admitted in Massachusetts in 1836 in the case Moody v. Rowell (ibid).

Early questioned document cases in the United States were hampered by limiting known writings in a case to only those already in evidence following the English common law practice. Court decisions in Massachusetts in 1814, followed later by Connecticut and Vermont, allowed the submission of other known writing samples (Hilton, 1979). This expansion of known writings available for submission in a case improved the quality of handwriting comparisons.

In the late 1800s, forensic document examination was expanded to include testimony on inks and typewriting (Levinson, 2001). Books published by early forensic document examiners included: A Treatise on Disputed Handwriting (1894) by William Elijah Hagan, Manual for the Study of Documents (1894) by Persifor Frazer, and Ames on Forgery (1899, 1901) by Daniel T. Ames (Riordan et al., 2013).

The Harm of Forgery and Plagiarism

Forgery is a form of fraud and is therefore as blameworthy as any other fraud that involves the production and sale of misrepresented goods. So much is uncontroversial. What is disputed is the extent to which the moral question ought to be allowed to affect the aesthetic response. One of the most useful treatments of this question has been supplied by Francis Sparshott, who wrote, “In seeking to appreciate a work we rely on its promise of a human significance and loyally entrust ourselves to that promise.” What the art forger “exploits and betrays is just the self-giving on which all human relationship depends.” Sparshott’s analogy has us imagine making passionate love in the dark to another who in the event turns out to be the wrong person. Anyone who claims that it makes no difference whether a painting one appreciates is forged is rather like the champion of free, indiscriminate sex, or making love to anyone in the dark. Sparshott thinks that authentic aesthetic experience, like sexual experience,

depends on imaginative construction and association, for only an imaginatively funded vision detects and responds to the meaningful structure of a picture or a musical piece. And, because all social and personal bonds are reciprocal but directly known from one end only, all the relationships we know or think we know ourselves to be living in are as fragile and subject to illusion as the art lover’s confidence in the authenticity of a work and the integrity of its artist.

This suggests that the enjoyment of the arts is in part a transaction between artistic creator and audience – a transaction that needs good faith and trust. There might therefore be mounting confusion in the future regarding what counts as a fake, given that technologies may enable a proliferation of copies and altered performances. Digital technologies not only allow the easy alteration of news photos and other visual material but also make it possible to improve a singer’s pitch or increase a pianist’s speed. Such doctoring may come to be considered normal procedure, or it may remain a kind of cheating. If the copying technologies for painting and sculpture can catch up with the digital transformations of sound, which may happen in the next few decades, our view of creativity in the visual arts may thereby change.

The existence of greed and profiteering in the art marketplace has prompted some forgers to try to mount a moral justification for their activities. Van Meegeren’s original intention, so he later claimed, for his activities was to avenge himself on critics who had humiliated him. The idea was that he would wait until the Emmaeus had been lauded by critics and experts, and then he would announce, to their cost and embarrassment, that he was the artist. However, there is good reason to doubt that this is something he ever seriously considered. He had produced forgeries before that painting and was making so much money as a forger that he had little incentive to stop simply for revenge’s sake.

Eric Hebborn contrived to justify himself by quoting Ernst Gombrich, who said that because pictures do not assert anything, they cannot be true or false. It follows, Hebborn claims, that his works cannot be false, and he is guilty of no crime. In answer to this, we can agree that a drawing is a drawing. It is the forger’s claim that it is by Tiepolo or Mantegna that is false. Pictures do not lie: It is only the people who make and sell them, such as Hebborn or van Meegeren, who do that. Hebborn’s justification fails.

The situation with regard to historical understanding and plagiarism is different. Because forgery is usually attributed to a historically important figure, forgery distorts and falsifies our understanding of art history. The historical damage of plagiarism, on the other hand, is normally minimal because the plagiarist is stealing contemporary work for his or her own designs, to help his or her own reputation. The successful forger, in contrast, affects our view of historically important artists and creators.

For some cynics, the only real damage done by forgers is what they inflict on the bank accounts of rich art investors. However, it is a mistake to see forgery in this way. Art is not just about beautiful things; it is about the visions of the world recorded in centuries past. The illustrated record of those visions can be corrupted by the skill and subterfuge of a contemporary faker. The extent to which this subtly distorts our grasp of our forebears’ understanding of their world remains to be seen. However, the skilled handiwork of people such as van Meegeren and Hebborn, when it succeeds, will distort our understanding of the history of graphic representation just as surely as a document forger’s skill might alter our understanding of the history of ideas. Forgery is not a victimless crime, even if the forger is successful and ‘no one knows.’ For the real victim is then our general understanding of the history of art and of human vision. As noted previously, many forgeries are recognized for what they are by later generations. But is a perfect, undetectable forgery possible? We can never be certain. The perfect forgeries existing among us are unknown, undetected aliens.

Ames on Forgery was written by Daniel T. Ames in 1901. He was a penmanship teacher and early Examiner of Contested Handwriting. He describes and illustrates cases of fraud and forgery. Questioned Documents was published in 1910, and a second edition in 1929. The author, Albert S. Osborn, is called the Father of Questioned Documents. He brought a scientific approach to forensic examination of questioned documents. Ames and Osborn believed that their opinions must be clearly demonstrated. In the last hundred years in questioned documents, the science has indeed become demonstrative. Ames and Osborn employed the side-by-side comparison of questioned with known writings using appropriate lighting and magnification that forensic document examiners still use today. This chapter also describes the beginnings of major forensic laboratories in the U.S. and Canada.

Forged Signatures

Signatures are often the subjects of forgery attempts. Depending upon the circumstances, the forgery may be accomplished in a number of ways. If the signature were to be furnished on the spot as in a stolen check, forgers would attempt the forgery in one of two ways. Either they would practice it from a copy of the authentic signature beforehand and then try to duplicate the check-owner’s signature on the check, or they would just write the check freehand, with no attempt to forge the signature. Hopefully for the forger, the merchant wouldn’t pay much attention to the signature. Figure 20.2 shows how signatures are compared.

The forgery of a document that does not have to be signed in front of someone else may be accomplished in different ways. It may be traced, for example. This could be done using transmitted light or tracing making an indented writing of the signature in a piece of paper and then retracing it. Most tracings of either type have characteristics that make them look artificial and the tracing may be apparent to the trained questioned document examiner. As with all questioned documents, the key to discovering a forged signature is collecting sufficient numbers of exemplars.

4 Bronze Statuary

In historical terms, art forgery received two of its strongest stimuli when Mummius sacked Corinth in 146 BC, and when Sulla captured Athens 60years later. In each instance, the spoils of war included some of the finest Classical stone and bronze statuary. Stay-at-home patricians and politicians who maintained fashionable homes in Rome and wanted to have artistic talking points for their banquets were left with little choice but to employ Greek artisans as copyists. The distinction between Greek originals and Roman imitations quickly became blurred. And matters became even more confused when Renaissance sculptors—Michelangelo among them—set up as their esthetic ideal an ability to emulate the Classical spirit. They plagiarized everything antique they could find. Benevenuto Cellini, with typical immodesty, is known to have felt that the quality of some of his metalwork surpassed Classical prototypes. He is suspected of indulging in some fakery as well.

No high-minded ideals, however, lie behind the fact that in recent years Thailand has become one of the centers of art forgery, with Bangkok as the entrepot to Western markets. Fakes are mingled with numerous genuine objects that have been systematically plundered from the ancient towns and cemeteries that lie hidden in the tangled undergrowth of the Eastern forests. The elaborately decorated bronze illustrated in Fig. 6 was said to have been part of a cache of statuary found by chance in the ruins of an ancient temple located somewhere close to the modern Thai/Kampuchean border. Its form occurred several times in the cache, in various sizes. Three of these pieces reached the London art market and were rumored to have a value in excess of $1.3 million. Yet all were fake, their metal being not bronze but brass—a copper/zinc alloy with a zinc content of over 30%—the technology for which was unknown in the Thai peninsula until the late fifteenth century at the earliest.Metallographic studies also indicated that an attempt had been made to create an artificial green patination on the surface of this Bodhisattva by pickling it in something akin to sulfuric acid. This too is a strong indication of fakery. It has to be said, however, that the modern taste for the soft green texture of true bronze patination (which, in reality, is just a thick layer of natural corrosion products) is not something that always has been shared by collectors in the past. In the nineteenth century it was not unusual for conservators to be asked to strip down a bronze’s surface to fresh metal, so that the natural patination was completely destroyed. To complicate matters even further, modern conservators sometimes are asked to put right that damage by the addition of a false patination. In similar vein, in China at various periods over the past millennium, as emperors have harked back to their ancestors of the Shang and Zhou dynasties (c. 1700–220 BC), they commissioned artisans to copy chance finds of the massive bronze vessels from those earlier times. Many of these well-intentioned imitations were deliberately pickled, so that today their patination has a strange-looking structure, with a natural layer of corrosion overlying an artificially induced one.

Background

In a recent paper, forgery of STR DNA through cloning the sequence in a plasmid and inserting it into a bacterium was highlighted (Frumpkin et al. 2010). In this experiment, modern computational tools will be used to obtain a nucleotide sequence containing the STR of interest from the NCBI database. The complementary strand of the DNA sequence of interest will be computed, and the plasmid map for the pET-15b cloning/expression plasmid will be obtained from the manufacturer’s website. Using the website for New England Biolabs, the DNA sequences cleaved by the restriction enzymes found in the multiple cloning site region of the plasmid will be identified. The double-stranded DNA sequence will be prepared for cloning by adding the restriction enzyme sequences to the regions upstream and downstream of the PowerPlex 16 primer region (Table 20.1). The prepared DNA sequence could be purchased or produced by PCR amplification from a template. By using the restriction enzymes to cut the DNA sequence with the primer region intact and the restriction sites added and the plasmid, the DNA can be inserted into the plasmid and ligated using DNA ligase in the lab.

TABLE 20.1. NCBI Accession Numbers for Loci Probed by PowerPlex16 Kits with Primer Sequences

Specifically, the nucleotide sequence containing the STR and primer binding region will be obtained from NCBI using the accession number (Table 20.1) to obtain the nucleotide sequence, Integrated DNA Technologies’ OligoAnalyzer DNA tools will be used to predict the complementary DNA strand, the plasmid map will be obtained from EMD Biosciences’ website, and the cleavage sequences of the restriction enzymes will be obtained from New England Biolabs’ website for the restriction enzymes contained in the cloning/expression region of the plasmid. The restriction enzyme sequences will be selectively added to the foreign piece of DNA upstream and downstream of the 5’ and 3’ primer sequences, respectively, in order to insert the DNA into the plasmid and code for the STR of interest.

Plasmids can be used to insert DNA into bacterial cells using a method called transformation. Restriction enzymes can be used to cut DNA in specific sequence locations leaving either a blunt end with (clean cut) or “sticky” end with a few base overhangs on one strand in a reaction called a digest. DNA ligase can be used to catalyze covalent bond formation between neighboring DNA bases previously cut in the plasmid or of the foreign DNA with the plasmid. Once inside the cell, the plasmid will be replicated, or amplified, by the bacteria using DNA polymerase. The plasmids containing the DNA sequence of interest could be extracted from the bacteria and planted at a crime scene, implicating a person with the STR allele(s) with the crime.

Forged Signatures

Signatures are very often the subject of forgery attempts. Depending on the circumstances, the forgery may be accomplished in a number of ways. If the signature is to be furnished on the spot, as in a stolen check, the forger would attempt the forgery in one of two ways. Either the person would practice it from a copy of the authentic signature beforehand and then try to duplicate the check owner's signature on the check, or would just write the check freehand, with no attempt to forge the signature. The forger might hope that the merchant wouldn't pay much attention to the signature. Figure 20.2 shows known and questioned signatures.

The forgery of a document that does not have to be signed in front of someone else may be done in different ways. It may be traced, for example. This could be done using transmitted light or tracing, making an indented writing of the signature in a piece of paper and then retracing it. Most tracings of either type have characteristics that make them look artificial, and the tracing may be apparent to the trained questioned document examiner. As with all questioned documents, the key to discovering a forged signature is collecting sufficient numbers of exemplars.

Signs of Problematic Opioid Use

One major concern for the long-term use of opioids in patients with chronic non–cancer-related pain is their potential for misuse and abuse. Multiple cross-sectional studies in clinic populations have indicated that treatment of noncancer pain with opioids is associated with a 40% prevalence of opioid misuse.50,51 Clinicians have reported several types of aberrant drug-related behavior (ADRB) that may be indicative of opioid misuse.52-54 Although such behavior is problematic and indicative of nonadherence to opioid therapy at the very least, many have not been empirically tested to distinguish opioid misuse without negative consequences from prescription opioid addiction. Of course, certain types of extreme behaviors, such as injecting oral formulations or compulsive, uncontrolled use of medication, have face validity suggestive of addiction. According to Portenoy,53,55 there are three major types of ADRBs: loss of control over the drug, compulsive drug use, and continued use despite harm. He suggested the following sets of drug-related behavior that may cause suspicion about problematic use in opioid-treated pain patients:

ADRB more predictive of addiction

Prescription forgery

Stealing or “borrowing” drugs from others

Injecting oral formulations

Obtaining prescription drugs from nonmedical sources

Concurrent abuse of alcohol or illicit drugs

Multiple dose escalation or other noncompliance with therapy despite warnings

Multiple episodes of prescription “loss”

Repeatedly seeking prescriptions from other clinicians or from emergency departments (EDs) without informing the prescriber or after a warning to desist

Evidence of deterioration in the ability to function at work, in the family, or socially that appears to be related to use of the drug

Repeated resistance to changes in therapy despite clear evidence of adverse physical or psychological effects from the drug

Selling prescription drugs (which is termed diversion and is not indicative of a substance use disorder per se but does signify a major ADRB)

ADRB less predictive of addiction (may be more indicative of poorly controlled pain or misuse without significant negative consequences)

Aggressive complaining about the need for more drug

Drug hoarding during periods of reduced symptoms

Requesting specific drugs

Openly acquiring similar drugs from other medical sources

Unsanctioned dose escalation or other noncompliance with therapy on one or two occasions

Unapproved use of the drug to treat another symptom

Reporting psychic effects not intended by the clinician

Resistance to change in therapy associated with “tolerable” adverse effects with expressions of anxiety related to the return of severe symptoms

Savage in 200256 also formulated a short list of patterns that may suggest addiction (“look for the four C’s”):

Adverse Consequences/harm as a result of use

Intoxicated, somnolent, sedated

Declining activity

Irritable, anxious, labile mood

Increasing sleep disturbances

Increasing pain complaints

Increasing relationship dysfunction

Impaired Control over use/Compulsive use

Reports lost or stolen prescriptions or medication

Frequent early renewal requests

Urgent calls or unscheduled visits

Abusing other drugs or alcohol

Cannot produce medication on request

Withdrawal noted at clinic visits

Observers reporting overuse or sporadic use

Preoccupation with use because of Craving

Frequently missed appointment unless opioid renewal expected

Does not try nonopioid treatments

Cannot tolerate most medications

Requests medication with high reward

No relief with anything else except opioids

It is important to remember that many of the types of behaviors listed may occur occasionally in isolation in patients using opioids appropriately, for the most part in the treatment of their chronic pain. However, a pattern of such behavior in the context of titrated pain therapy may suggest the need for further evaluation to determine the presence of prescription opioid addiction. It is still unclear exactly which constellations of symptoms or behaviors accurately distinguish misuse from abuse and addiction. These are thought to exist on a continuum, with the most severe form of nonadherence—addiction—characterized by the four “C’s.”

Early and proper identification, as well as careful monitoring for signs of problematic opioid use and ADRB, is warranted. Once identified, several measures may be taken by the prescribing physician to control for such aberrant behavior and reduce risk for the subsequent development of an addiction problem, including the following:

Writing an opioid pain treatment agreement, if one is not available, in which expectations and conditions for termination of opioid prescription are clearly outlined

Increasing the number of office visits and more frequent monitoring

Decreasing the number of medication dispensed per visit

Performing random pill counts on visits

Recommending the use of only one pharmacy

Using prescription drug–monitoring programs (PDMPs) to determine whether the patient has been getting prescriptions from multiple providers, EDs, or both

Avoiding early prescriptions and excluding any replacement of lost or stolen prescriptions

Requiring police reports for stolen medications

Performing random urine drug screens and considering consultation with an addiction specialist if true addiction to the opioid medication is suspected

Careful assessment is essential to determine the underlying cause and co-occurring physical and mental comorbid conditions that may contribute to such behavior.51,57-60 Reliance on patient self-reports of medication use to determine inappropriate behavior has been shown to be notoriously unreliable and inaccurate since patients tend to underestimate their medication use.61-66 Cook and colleagues65 found that when patients’ self-reports were compared with urine toxicology screens, the actual prevalence rate of drug use was approximately 50% higher than the estimate produced by self-reports. Berndt and coauthors62 also reported that 32% of patients’ self-reports of their use of medication did not match with their urine tests.

In addition, “gut feelings” by some prescribers who are confident that they can identify vulnerable individuals should be avoided since empirical evidence has shown them to be ineffective.16,51 Wasan and associates16 found that even though prescribers had judged only 14% of their chronic pain patients to have ADRB, approximately 50% were found to have positive urine drug screens for illicit drugs and 8.7% had no evidence of any opioids in their urine.

In an attempt to decrease the risk for opioid misuse and iatrogenic addiction to prescribed opioid medications, Gourlay and coworkers67 recommended establishing a policy of “universal precautions” when prescribing opioid analgesics:

Making a diagnosis with appropriate differential

Psychological assessment, including risk for addictive disorders

Informed consent

Treatment agreement (previously called an “opioid contract”)

Preintervention and postintervention assessment of pain level and function

Appropriate trial of opioid therapy with or without adjunctive medication

Reassessment of pain score and level of function

Regular assessment of the “four A’s” of pain medicine (analgesia, activity, adverse effects, and aberrant behavior)

Periodic review of the pain diagnosis and comorbid conditions

Proper documentation

Forged Writings

There are three types of forged writings:

Traced forgery: In this type, the writer traces over a signature or other writing. Because the writer does not write in his or her natural hand, it is not possible to identify the writer, but it is possible to determine if the writing was produced by tracing.

Simulated forgery: This is the copying of a signature or other writing by “drawing” it. If the writing contains enough normal characteristics of the writer’s true hand, it may be possible to identify the writer. In any case, a determination can be made that the writing itself was produced by simulation.

Freehand forgery: This writing is made in the natural hand of the writer. No attempt is made at tracing or simulating. In freehand forgery, the identity of the writer may be determined.

In all three types, the document examiner will need to have “true” writing in order to make comparisons.