The facts of the case are also so plainly in your favour that you should be able to get a lawyer on contingency to go after the agency and potentially also landlord for damages.
[1] https://oag.ca.gov/ecrime/httap
[3] https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-preventio...
[4] https://www.zdnet.com/article/citrix-acquires-rightsignature...
[5] https://www.bu.edu/alumni/profile/antonio-g-gomes-esq tony.gomes@citrix.com
No.
They might be. There may also be compensation for time, effort and distress. In some cases, statute provides double and treble damages, or allows for reïmbursement of legal costs.
More directly: the links I provided are more criminal than civil in nature. Damages are relevant in sentencing.
It's also very rare -- I worked in a similar company for years and only heard of one case of disputed signing and none of disputed contents.
I would not count on a judge to read through technical mumbo-jumbo even if it's completely obvious to you how hashes work, it's probably not for them, so the company has to put a statement.
The phrase "indentured" means "cut into sharp pointy teeth" (a zig zag pattern). The contract is written out in triplicate by hand on a large sheet. Being hand-cut after the whole document is signed, it is hard to perfectly replicate that cut. Additionally, someone would write "A BIG LATIN WORD" over the area to be cut, so to forge the other piece(s) you have to recreate the demi-penstrokes plausibly.
When two copies don't match, someone is lying. The essential third copy is stored at the Notary Office, which tells you whom is lying.
"Indentured servants" were bound by such a contract.
The split tally is similarly elegant.
Of course, just giving a notary a copy works almost as well.
this is a lazy, clumsy editing attempt, done through a document registration service which exists to prevent exactly this and yet, you have to be an experienced nerd (eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Garrett has a doctorate and decades of software development experience) who will jump through a bunch of hoops to even begin to build a case beyond he-said-she-said. And he still doesn't have a settlement or criminal conviction in hand, so he's not even half done... Or look at the extensive forensics in the Craig Wright case just to establish simple things like that they were edited or backdated to a legally acceptable level.
Meanwhile, the original PDF edit in question took maybe 5 minutes with entry-level PDF tools.
But for official documents used as legal proof, staying as close as possible to the original is required for a forgery to avoid sticking out simply for having the wrong formatting. But you usually won't find those posted publicly on the internet.
Xournal++
You research took time and their illegal withholding robbed you of your money’s time value.
More pointedly, the people involved would rationally pay well to avoid even the complaint making it into a public filing.
Did you ask a lawyer-- any lawyer-- before writing the sentence surrounding this word?
I assume the answer is yes. But I also think I remember reading a blog by you where you wasted hours attempting to reverse-engineer some hardware before finally sending it the help flag.
I also found out that metadata can be overwritten. What is the best possible way to save yourself from these kinds of problems I wonder?
There is a lot of movement in that space right now because European governments use this data for VAT processing and have discovered that signed machine-readable data is a lot better than stacks of paper audited by humans
Another part of the solution is reporting such cases and making sure these people are charged with fraud
Have multiple copies of everything, at the time of signing. I usually get two copies of a contract. I sign them both, the other party signs them both, and we each get a copy. Same with any amendments or codicils.
We are each responsible for maintaining our own copy.
There should be a way to do this digitally.
If they could do it digitally then you pull in your expert to testify that it was changed and they pull in their expert to testify that it wasn't or if it was then it was done by some mysterious hacker and they shouldn't be held liable for the attempt.
Meanwhile with paper, the judge and jury can look at your copy and see that it was obviously printed out and the aged for 10 years where their copy is fresh off the presses and your signature on it is either not a match at all or is suspiciously identical on every line.
Even if the digital version can be technically safer, I feel the paper version tells a more compelling story that non-cryptography experts can follow along with.
It's a better technical solution but unfortunately it's not as simple as you'd hope it to be.
Adobe says: Source of Trust obtained from European Union Trusted Lists (EUTL). This is a Qualified Electronic Signature according to EU Regulation 910/2014.
Foxit says: Source of Trust obtained from European Union Trusted Lists (EUTL). This is a Qualified Electronic Signature according to EU Regulation 910/2014.
It feels like just a mistake or an error with RightSignature? Like they uploaded the wrong doc, clicked the wrong button, and were confused on their side because the version they meant to send was at the top of the page?
If you just mean that they had the second version in their system but never intended to send it at all, then I'm not sure what possible innocent explanation there would be for uploading a newly modified version of an already signed lease that's run its course.
> Interestingly, the certificate page was identical in both documents, including the checksums, despite the content being different.
I think they took this to mean that the signed copy and the copy with the fraudulent addendum both hashed to the same checksum, but I'm not sure that's what was meant; based on the article it's not obvious to me that OP was able to check the signed checksum, though I can't imagine they didn't try. It's the 'original checksum' field that matched the base.pdf clean document without signature or addendum.
Option A: Return the deposit themselves immediately (since they claim to be mere intermediaries, surely they can recoup from their client)
Option B: Provide full landlord details AND actively facilitate the return by compelling their client to comply with the law
The pdf-forgery and the back and forth with the agency is huge shaming fun, but the deposit is the goal.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250926012745/https://mjg59.dre...
Yes it's very convoluted, as everything with PDFs, but it's there.