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Comment by Conlectus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

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).

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.

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