Fraud fears regarding scanned signatures on documents
In the Guardian today:
Electronic signatures scanned on to driving licences and passports differ so much from people’s usual signatures that they may not guard against fraud, it has been claimed.Well, that’s hardly surprising – instead of your normal signature, you usually have to squeeze it into a little box which is too small and that results in bits of the signature landing outside the box. Then the whole thing gets reduced in size when it gets printed onto the document which in some cases is no larger than a credit card.
On the other hand, passports these days are full of other biometric data, so it really shouldn’t be a problem for the governments, and as far as fraud is concerned, I’d have thought signatures on credit cards would be of more concern (if anyone in the shops actually looked at them!). These are even more problematic, since in addition to being restricted in space, you are often compelled to try and write them on a piece of slippery plastic, with the result that the signature looks nothing like your usual squiggle any way.