Singapore busts forged documents with new forensics strategy

By Bobbie Ysabelle Matias

Singapore’s health regulatory board has been using a novel approach in examining digital documents submitted to them amid a rise in forgery.

Since 2020, the Forensic Chemistry and Physics Lab under the city-state’s Health Sciences Authority (HSA) has been utilising traditional methods and analysis of a document’s metadata to detect signs of manipulation.

The agency is the first in the field to take such an approach for document forensics, according to Nellie Cheng, a consultant forensic scientist with HSA who specialises in the traditional analysis methods.

Change of method

Traditional methods require examining handwriting and signatures, among other elements. 

At the same time, the file data is also checked down to each byte, The Straits Times reported.

HSA recently applied this approach to a PDF file submitted to them as evidence by one of the parties involved in a dispute over the ownership of a proprietary design in 2022.

At first glance, the document seemed as though it was created before 2015 and indicated several industrial designs made and dated prior to that year.

However, upon examination, HSA’s lab found that the document had been doctored because it used a font file that did not exist before 2015.

How did the lab figure it out? By applying their novel forensics approach and analysing the file’s data streams.

“Data streams are like packets of information inside a file. If you extract these streams, initially they may not be readable by humans.” 

“But by extracting and decoding them, you can find out what the information is,” according to Louis Koh, a senior forensic scientist at HSA.

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Combating fraud

The lab’s new strategy was also used for a document from 2023, which had signatures containing Chinese characters.

It was discovered that multiple signatures had similar pixels, meaning that they were copied and replicated digitally, contrary to the claim that it was signed on paper.

HSA’s novel approach comes at a time when such questioned documents – as the board labelled them – involved in fraud and forgery cases have been on the rise in the past years, including in the Wirecard scandal and the SG$ 3 billion (US$ 2.2 billion) money laundering scheme in the city-state.

There has also been an increase in the number of digital files submitted to HSA, with the agency saying that nearly 10 percent of the over 700 submissions in the last three years were digital documents.

Cheng expressed her confidence about the new forensic strategy, saying that those planning to commit fraud through forgery or by tampering with documents should reconsider because it is impossible for them to get away with it.

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