Bank statements were by far the most popular document type verified by VerifyPDF in 2024. In fact, bank statements have solidified their position as the document of choice for financial fraudsters, accounting for nearly three-fifths of all fraudulent submissions across lending, insurance and other regulated industries. Even companies involved in online gambling are processing more and more bank statements these days.
What makes bank statements such a common target? Their ability to verify both financial health and payment history makes them essential documents for many purposes beyond just loan applications. In our years of advising all sorts of parties, we have recommended our clients to request bank statements as a way to add proof to something (for example, a salary payment).
For each transaction, there should be a bank statement
Bank statements are issued by a financial institution. The source (the bank’s online banking environment) is generating these PDFs on request (when a button gets pressed), the document has certain traceability that no other documents can replicate. Getting bank statements in PDF format from the bank is becoming increasingly common as companies are encouraged to go paperless.
If someone claims anything financially related, there should be an accompanying bank statement:
- For a travel insurance claim on cancellation costs for a hotel, there should be a payment with a credit card in a bank statement.
- For a salary paid by an employer, there should be a payment with a bank transfer from the employer.
- For a deposit to a crypto wallet, there should be an initial outflow out of a bank’s checking account.
You get the point. Bank statements are a great way to certify what is happening. And having two documents pointing to the same event (payslip + bank statement or invoice + bank statement) is a good place to be as a fraud analyst.
The hidden problem with fake bank statements
Bank statement fraud, once a messy affair of photocopies and basic alterations, has evolved into a sophisticated criminal enterprise that costs businesses billions annually. Today’s fraudsters are not just armed with basic editing software: they are using AI-powered tools that can generate completely fabricated bank statements indistinguishable from genuine ones. These synthetic documents come complete with realistic transaction patterns, accurate bank formatting and even properly calculated running balances.
Lending institutions report a 40% increase in sophisticated bank statement forgeries since 2022, while real estate companies face an unprecedented wave of rental applications supported by manipulated financial documents. We know about this first hand, as the founders of VerifyPDF were also the ones that built Properize, a fraud detection solution for real estate agents, sold in 2024 to a leading Dutch real estate portal.
How is this happening?
Adobe Acrobat Pro, a well known PDF editor, now enables seamless text-layer modifications without file conversion, allowing counterparty names, dates, transaction amounts and balances to be modified while preserving original document metadata and structure. In other words, it is possible to make a fake bank statement that is undetectable to the human eye. Forensic examinations reveal that 73% of fraudulent statements show signs of direct PDF content layer editing, compared to 12% involving scanned document forgeries.
The traditional approach of manual verification is dead in the water. Human reviewers, no matter how experienced, simply cannot detect the subtle inconsistencies in modern forgeries. This is where advanced technology becomes crucial.
Quite interestingly, we have noticed what seems to be a bias towards smaller regional banks, fintechs and local real estate agencies. This has to do with the perception of fraudsters around smaller organizations having less sophisticated detection infrastructure compared to national or even global players. This goes both ways: smaller credit institutions get their bank statement templates cloned more often and they themselves become a target of document fraud more frequently.
How to make PDFs more secure?
While PDF security features exist to protect document integrity, their implementation and effectiveness remain surprisingly limited. Some banks have started adding security features to PDFs for Investment Accounts, but the traditional checking accounts have been left the same way for decades.
The most secure PDF files can restrict users from changing a document, combining multiple files, extracting pages, copying text and even printing the files. Digital certificates with cryptographic keys can be embedded and even validation QR codes have been used by some banks, specially in Russia and South America.
However, in our experience, most of these techniques have several limitations:
- Passwords and other security features can be bypassed easily
- Print restrictions can be circumvented
- Document scanning eliminates security measures
- QR codes can point to legitimate-looking websites
Changes made to bank statements are virtually impossible to identify without having a copy of the original bank statement to compare them to. But that is not really possible in most situations…
How does VerifyPDF know?
Even when banks implement security features, the protection chain breaks at its weakest link: the ability to print and rescan documents. This process effectively strips away all embedded security measures, rendering the original protections meaningless. However, VerifyPDF can detect this in a heartbeat and issue the appropriate warning. At the end of the day, what would be the reason for someone to do anything like that with a bank statement that can simply be downloaded from the bank?
VerifyPDF has focused largely on understanding the specification of thousands of bank statements from over 90 countries. This enables us to automatically verify whether the document comes directly from its claimed source or not.
Recommendations and best practices
The ease of digital manipulation teaches us an important lesson: we need to be aware of the techniques used by fraudsters and stay alert to prevent those fake bank statements from slipping through our business processes. Our advice is as follows:
- All bank statements can be downloaded from the bank directly, do not accept printed or scanned copies that come from somewhere else. It is as simple as “Download and Send”, no “Download, Print, Scan and Send”.
- Be especially alert of PDF bank statements in which the text cannot be selected with the cursor. Those tend to be images repackaged into PDF format after some form of manipulation, mainly with Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator.
- Look for differences in font styles and colors, but remember that anybody could just reuse the same font style and color to make a pixel perfect fake bank statement.
As fraudsters become more sophisticated in their techniques, financial institutions must adapt and strengthen their verification processes. VerifyPDF leads this technological advancement by combining AI-powered analysis with deep document forensics expertise, enabling businesses to detect even the most convincing fake bank statements.