You can also listen to the article in audio version.
A gift deed for a house with obviously fictitious information and a signature printed in blue with a very rough screen printing. A bad copy, or perhaps even a fake recognizable at first glance.
Some time ago, as part of an experiment, such a document was pushed to 65 domestic authorities – these were notary offices, but also the Czech Post Office, registry offices, municipal authorities or the Chamber of Commerce. In short, different types of places that can perform the so-called vidification, i.e. official verification that the copy literally matches the presented document.
And 39 authorities saw such a forgery for 30 crowns without any problem, which means 60 percent of them. However, the correctness or veracity of the data is not confirmed. But it follows from the law that a document that is not an original may not be witnessed, which of course is not a forgery, moreover, a completely obvious one. However, the fact that this happens, according to the forensic expert and author of the experiment Jiří Závora, is caused by two factors.
“The first and most important thing is the underestimation of identification. It is generally believed that it is so-called ‘just identification’, that it is nothing. When you ask an official about the rationale, he usually answers ‘if it was signature verification, it would be something else’,” explains Závora, who is preparing the publication of the experiment for publication in a professional journal.
In other words, officials focus mainly on signature verification, i.e. legalization, because assets are transferred on the basis of just such documents. The assumption that there is no major risk is still held in the consciousness of the visual inspection.
“But there’s a catch. If you understand the fraudster’s modus operandi, it’s clear that a certified copy of a document that never existed can put a defrauded person in an absolutely unsolvable situation,” adds Závora, who encounters similar problems in his expert practice.
Fraudsters try
The deed on view simply proves that an original once existed. In a lawsuit, one party claims that the original was allegedly lost or destroyed. The other party counters that it is a forgery. Since there is no original, all that remains is to examine the officially certified document by an expert. However, such a copy is usually of very poor quality and an expert has no chance to verify almost anything from it.
“I have encountered this at least three times, and I see it as a very fundamental problem,” confirms attorney Martin Richter, who also works at the Department of Criminal Law at the Faculty of Law of Charles University.
And it often involves a lot of money, for example when an inheritance is being dealt with and two survivors sign completely different wills. However, quite ordinary things also happen, which are no less unpleasant. This is how Seznam Zprávy documented a case where an unknown company applied to the apartment of a victim of fraud precisely thanks to a verified document. It was discovered by accident when a letter addressed to this very company arrived in the mailbox.
“Thanks to the certified copy, they created the impression that I gave my consent,” Michal describes how a company suddenly appeared at his address. The editors know his full name, but do not mention it for privacy reasons.
In court, of course, not only the authenticated document is assessed, the sequence of events, testimony and other documents are examined. At the very least, it is a big complication. So that’s part of the problem, not much weight is attached to vidimation, even though it can have a significant impact on the lives of potential victims of fraud.
“The second factor is something we read as ordinary indifference on the part of the supervisory departments,” Jiří Závora adds another problem.
This is already the second round of the experiment, the first and very similar one was already carried out by the Institute of Forensic Sciences Prague (IFSP) in 2017, and Seznam Zprávy also described it then. He turned out very similarly. Of the 66 authorities, 51, i.e. 77 percent, verified the forgeries. So the situation has improved, but only slightly, which cannot be considered very good news in the case of a process where absolute reliability is expected.
“Representatives of the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Justice and the Chamber of Notaries were familiarized with the whole issue in detail after the first experiment. However, the Ministry of the Interior reacted favorably only after the second experiment in 2024. The Department of Justice took responsibility for the whole issue already in 2019, but the Notaries Chamber exerts direct influence on notaries, which basically led us by the nose after the first experiment and the results of the second experiment from last year at all she didn’t react,” adds Závora.
However, the Chamber of Notaries argues that it trains all notaries as part of fraud prevention and is definitely addressing the issue. However, it does not register any complaints about forgeries of certified documents.
“During the seven years you mentioned, there was no specific case from practice when the court, the police or another body pointed out that a forgery was successfully brought into the proceedings precisely because of a notary’s identification. Then, of course, we cannot talk about a systemic problem and any related remedy,” says Radim Neubauer, president of the Notary Chamber of the Czech Republic.
Just look at the paper
Notaries fall under the Chamber of Notaries, only above it is the Ministry of Justice as a supervisory authority, which, according to a statement for Seznam Zpravy, received assurances that the Chamber of Notaries deals with issues related to identification.
“As the Ministry of Justice does not take this issue lightly, we immediately asked the Institute of Forensic Disciplines for detailed results, in particular information on specific notary offices where they noted errors during the verification. However, the Institute did not send this information to the Ministry with the request. We were therefore unable to start our own specific investigation as part of state supervision,” adds Marcela Nevšímalová, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Justice.
The Institute of Forensic Disciplines Prague did it this way on purpose. He was not concerned with punishing specific notaries and authorities, but with solving the matter as such.
It is the official positions that fall under the Ministry of the Interior. It has already produced a practical guide after the first experiment for officials who are carrying out this agenda or preparing for the verification exams. The Ministry intends to continue the education of officials and uses the conclusions from both mentioned experiments, which pointed out shortcomings.
“In this context, it is necessary to comment on the way the experiment was carried out by the IFSP – among other things, very successful forgeries created by an expert in the field of graphology were presented to the officials for verification. The verification workers do not have sufficient technical equipment or experience to detect such high-quality forgeries, and it is not even their role,” says Ondřej Krátoška, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior.
On the other hand, it should be added that in the course of the experiment, 26 people recognized the forgery without any problem. And this is also the fundamental essence of the problem and its solution in the future. It turned out that a quarter of the officials who saw the fake document did not even look at it. In order to reduce the error rate in the future, it would be enough for the officials to be interested in the document at all.
It would also help if they had a magnifying glass on hand, which the Ministry of the Interior already addressed this year at a consultation day with representatives of regional authorities. And finally, as the Závora expert adds, so that vision as such should not be underestimated.
