यह लेख फ़िलहाल केवल अंग्रेज़ी में उपलब्ध है।
A letter arrives on WhatsApp. It has a government emblem, a reference number, an officer's name, and a deadline. It says you must act today.
Stop there. Urgency is the oldest tool in the box, and every convincing forgery has it.
Look at the file, not the letterhead
An emblem is a picture. So is a stamp, an officer's signature, and a QR code that goes nowhere. All four are trivial to copy from a real document, and all four are what forgeries copy first.
What is hard to fake is a digital signature, because it is calculated from the file and locked with a key held by the issuing office. That is the thing to check, and it takes about two minutes.
The five signs
1. It is a real PDF, not a photo
Genuine departmental output is a PDF. A JPEG, a screenshot, or a photo of a screen has had any signature stripped out of it — there is nothing left to check. Ask for the original file.
2. It carries a signature you can check
Open it in VeriPatra. A real signed document comes back digitally signed and unaltered. If it comes back with no signature at all, that is not proof of a forgery, but it is a reason to confirm through the department's own website before you do anything.
3. The signer chains to a recognised authority
VeriPatra shows who issued the signing certificate. Government signatures chain back to India's official Certifying Authority roots. A signature that validates but chains to nobody recognised is an amber flag, not a green one.
4. Nothing changed after signing
This is the quiet one. A forger's easiest move is to take a genuine signed document and edit two lines — a name, an amount, a date. The maths catches it instantly and VeriPatra reports changed after signing.
5. The route matches the message
Departments do not usually demand payment over WhatsApp, and they do not conduct arrests over video calls. If the letter's contents and the way it reached you do not match how that office actually works, treat the letter as unverified no matter how good it looks.
"Digital arrest" scams open with an official-looking PDF and then keep you on a call so you never have time to check it. Hang up. Check the file. Call the department on a number you looked up yourself, not one from the letter.
What a check cannot tell you
VeriPatra confirms who signed a document and whether it changed. It does not confirm that what the document says is true, that the officer named has the authority claimed, or that the demand is lawful.
A genuinely signed letter can still be wrong. Verify the file first, then verify the claim with the department directly.
Every check you run is saved as a local record on your own device, with a Trust Passport per document — useful if you later need to show what you checked and when.
एक PDF डालें और आठों जाँच खुद देखें। कोई खाता नहीं, कुछ भी सहेजा नहीं जाता।