Hacker News Reader

Comment by iamandras | Hacker News Reader

What is the use-case? Why should I have a PDF that looks scanned?

I've also had to do something similar to "forge" supporting documentation for medical claims. In order to claim FSA money, I had to provide detailed invoices. My hospital, however, was a big Kafka fan. They would only provide invoices that had a date and an amount, and those would take about 8 months to arrive. In order to get a detailed invoice, you had to call...but the catch is that detailed invoices were no longer available after 6 months. After every service, I'd have to immediately call for the detailed version, but if there were any after-the-fact adjustments due to insurance, I'd never be able to get a detailed statement.

To remedy this, I'd doctor previous invoices, and then print, scan, and fax to hide any editing artifacts. Keep in mind, this is all to get my own money that I'd contributed to the FSA. After that year, I just stopped using the FSA because it was such a pain.

Wow what a pain in the ass.

The last FSA I had was the exact opposite. They put my FSA on a Visa card, then I went to the optometrist and forgot to use it and paid on my own credit card. A week later, I got a check in the mail from my FSA with a note basically saying "Hey, you could have used your FSA for that, so here's an automatic reimbursement."

EDIT: It may have been an HSA, not an FSA. I don't remember.

Oh, that's the best part. I did have the Visa, but for whatever reason they hospital never coded things properly, so I had to fall back to the manual reimbursement.

How did the FSA operator (or whatever they are called) know about the transaction, and so quickly?

Since it's on a card issued by the FSA provider (I also don't know the correct word), they see the transactions in real time. Data that accompanies the transaction lets them know that it's reimbursable medical care.

I believe because some organizations require "wet" signatures on documents, and ask to be emailed scans of those signatures.

This would assumedly let you use an image of your signature rather than printing and signing.

The crazy thing is everyone is carrying around devices that would provide much better proof than a "wet signature".

It is trivial to take a timestamped and geo stamped video in this day and age of a person agreeing to a contract, and yet the standard is still "signatures".

Meanwhile people are posting video clips of themselves and their locations all day on WhatsApp/instagram/tiktok/youtube/facebook.

I really hope this isn’t real. I thought this was just a fun project.

This really happens, especially at big companies. The lack of logic in requiring a literal wet signature but then scanning and emailing the resulting document gets lost in the "but the policy says...". It's mostly been with compliance and security groups in my experience.

This is unfortunately entirely real.

A lot of companies in the EU are still refusing to accept eIDAS PDF signatures (which are actually verifiable, and required by EU and national law to be accepted for all purposes previously requiring a "wet" signature).

Existence proof: I have personally encountered it. QED.

We just bought a home, and the bank required wet signatures on a few of the (then scanned) documents. This app would have saved me time.

But if the bank requires a wet signature and you try to pass off a non-wet signature as a wet signature, isn't that fraud?

Likely, but it probably ends up being "harmless fraud" and even if prosecuted the judge would be like "what?".

If the bank really cared, they would ask for the PDF and have you mail the wet signed documents in.

Likely the requirement for a wet signature is left over from earlier times (think fax machines) OR they are trying to ensure that the person actually signing is the person signed (in other words, YOU did the signature, not you asking your wife/broker/whoever to apply it for you).

It is very real, unfortunately. I handles contract often and have clients who demands for wet signature, even during the pandemic. Majority of that coming from public sector.

No, this happens -- in really horrifying situations.

Oh yes, this happens. A lot.

In the situations where you are supposed to manually sign and scan a printed out pdf, this way instead you can paste your signature with transparency onto it, reform as pdf and then make it looked scanned.

At some point in my education, it was pretty common that some teachers sent us scanned PDFs instead of the original PDFs _or_ even more hilarious, gave us the printed scans of the PDFs.

I assumed that this software is basically a tongue-in-cheek reference to that, I had no idea this can actually have a practical purpose.

To comply with dumb signature requirements. I needed this a couple of times. Usually it goes like this. You fill out a PDF form electronically, and add the signature via Adobe. Then you email it.

A lot of the times the recipient will complain that the signature was not handwritten. They want you to print it, sign it and scan it again. So you do this trick to make it look like you followed this process.

This website is not the first one that tries to achieve this. But I would not trust uploading anything to a random Web server though.

I usually do it via command line. You can use ImageMagick (i.e via the 'convert' command) to achieve the same result. It's very handy.

Some colleges require students to scan pages and submit them for their homework rather than simply submitting document files

For fun of the implementation, I imagine.

But you could use it to get one over people who insist on receiving (scanned) 'originals' or 'wet-ink signature's, by combining it with something like handwritten.js [0]..!

[0] - https://alias-rahil.github.io/handwritten.js/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com