Digital forgery

An ID that was never printed, but instead edited or generated on a computer.

The person never held a physical card. They created or changed an image of one with software and submitted the image as if it were a photo of a real document.

A wholly digital fabrication, often generative, presented as a captured document image. Generative means an AI model created the image from a description or a sample.

Digital forgeries come from a few sources:

• Image editing software, which changes text and photos on a real document image.
• Template-based generators, which fill a fake document template with chosen details.
• Generative AI, which can produce a realistic document image from scratch.

Because the image never came from a physical card, detection looks at the image and the capture:

1. The system checks the image for editing artifacts, unnatural textures, and inconsistent details.
2. It checks whether the image shows signs of being recaptured from a screen.
3. It checks whether the image came directly from the device camera at the moment of submission.

Digital forgery sits next to terms that are easy to mix up:

• Counterfeit document is a physical fake, while a digital forgery exists only as an image.
• Screen replay detection catches photos of screens, which is one way a digital forgery is submitted.
• Deepfake is AI-generated media of a person, and a digital forgery is AI-generated or edited media of a document.

For more, see The New KYC Threat Model: When Documents Become Executable.