PDF Forgeries Are Surprisingly Rare (2022)

Commenters mostly grappled with Gwern’s claim that forged PDFs are uncommon. Several argued rarity comes from technical friction: tristanj said PDFs are hard to edit well because they’re a presentation format, split into many objects and awkward kerning, so casual forgers give up; mjg59 and exmadscientist added that good forgeries are rare because doing them well is difficult, and metadata often exposes fakes. Others pushed back on the scope of “rare”: sjtgraham pointed to private, high-impact forgeries like altered bank statements in mortgage fraud (citing FinCEN and a DOJ case), and TZubiri argued many scams and fake documents are indeed distributed as PDFs (from bogus diplomas to scam attachments and even hypothetical fake research uploads). Eru clarified Gwern was mostly discussing editing existing PDFs rather than creating new ones.

Opinion divides over why forgeries are uncommon and where they occur. One camp treats technical difficulty and forensic metadata as the main deterrents; another sees many successful frauds simply created as new PDFs or used privately rather than publicly, so they wouldn’t show up in the places Gwern surveyed. A few commenters also debated peripheral points - a typo noted by eru, a correction that PDF stands for “Portable,” and an off-topic dispute over the cultural influence of a nicotine article - but the central disagreement remained whether rarity reflects genuine scarcity or just different modes and venues of forgery.