Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

I work in a very bureocratic work and for some years I needed to sign a lot of papers each day. Actually all these was prepared by an assistant but need to had my signature because of the position I had.

To solve this I had made a stamp with my name and signature. I had visited a shop that sells stamps, put my signature on a paper and after some days they presented me a wooden stamp with a perfect copy of my signature on it. So when the papers needed signing I gave it to my assistant and she just stamped my sign to all the needed papers!

Of course that means that she could also sign other things as myself but I trusted her and was careful to sometimes glimpse at the papers that were signed (they all had the same template).

I have to confess though that it was really crazy how easy it was to copy my signature and have a way to sign every kind of paper. I presume that if some signature of me was in a non proper place I could complain and a specialist would recognise it...

Signatures are not really anti-forgery proof as most people expect...

Instead they are protected by law. If you sign something claiming to be someone else, you have broken the law.

That's why credit cards required a signature for a long time, yet nobody ever checked the signatures on the receipt vs the card. It isn't hard to fake someone else's signature, but doing so is a crime. Using someone else's card without a signature would just be a breach of the T&C's, but not a crime.

> Using someone else's card without a signature would just be a breach of the T&C's, but not a crime.

Even without forging a signature, it would still constitute theft or fraud, no?

With the other persons permission, I wouldn't think it would be theft or fraud.

Okay, but in that case you're not breaking the law if you sign in their name -- at least in some countries. So it'd be probably back to "just a ToS violation".

If you had their permission then no it wouldn't be a crime.

But if someone had signed the card and you signed your own name on the receipt then you didn't commit fraud right? It is this system assuming that the receipt signature was checked against the card?

You’d think the law could just say that you can’t pretend (via any mechanism, a signature or otherwise) to be someone else in order to receive some material gain.

In the UK at least that is indeed a crime and I assume it's in one of the model criminal codes in the US. "Theft by deception" - basically you need to show intent to deceive and thereby permanently deprive someone of something of value.

So "Lied about going to the same high school, she gave me her number" doesn't cut it, but "Showed my brother's ID to the dealer, drove away with a car" is definitely a crime.

It does already say that; that would come under the heading of "fraud".

You can do that passively by just not correcting people who assume you're authorized. If you require a clear cut act of deception in order to complete a fraud, such as signing someone else's name, it becomes very easy to prosecute.

I was reading this, and I was like, wow that really sounds like a Greek gov't job, and . . . then I see your name.

Geia sou re patrioti :P

Lol etsi akrivws einai :)

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