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Detecting Fraud in Court Filings: Postal Meters, Color Printers/Copiers, and

Toners

I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advise.

I've heard several people on various fathers rights groups lists make claims that
the court clerk and a lawyer conspired to falsify the date of various documents in
their case, and I believe that there has been evidence of lawyers who have given
large sums of money to various clerks as questionable gifts. In other cases,
people have claimed that lawyers actually created documents that were supposedly
created by independently clients, before the lawyers met with them, etc.

In response, Dan Diebolt said "This discussion may seem technical and
conspiratorial, but I personally have caught several irregularities about when a
document was mailed by closely examining the cancellation and Pitney Bowes
metering of envelopes. Attention to extreme detail may be justified."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has been doing some interesting work detecting
hidden time, date, and serial number codes created by various digital printers:

http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/printers/docucolor/
http://www.eff.org/wp/investigating-machine-identification-code-technology-color-
laser-printers

If you have original documents for which you believe the court clerk falsified the
date, or you believe that you are in possession of documents that were printed by
the clerk or another party in violation of court rules or the law, it may be
helpful to contact the people at EFF, and ask them if they can provide you with an
expert report showing the date, time, and serial number of your documents based on
those hidden tracking codes.

I would think that direct evidence of a clerk who committed fraud by falsifying
the date of court filings, provided by a neutral third party, might get me a fresh
hearing, and possibly allow me to get evidence of a change of venue motion.
Either way, I think that the clerk himself or herself would be personally liable
for his/her fraud, as well as the lawyer.

Dan Diebolt <dandiebolt@yahoo.com> added:

Tampering with records on file with a clerk of a court is a federal offense:

18 USC 2071
Concealment, removal, or mutilation generally
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/2071.html

See also:

MCL 750.491
http://legislature.mi.gov/doc.aspx?mcl-750-491

I wonder what the argument would be to bring the


custodian of records for tapes from referee hearings
under either of these statutes.

BTW, I think those dots only show up on color laser printers.


Most documents filed with a clerk are going to be
black and white.
A commenter suggested only a post dated file was useful, and that most printers in
offices are black and white. I felt that a future date is useful. If a document
shows a date 10-20 days after a clerk time stamped it, then that is evidence that
the clerk's time stamp was forged.

Yes, the natural expectation is that the lawyer, caught in a fraud, will lie and
say that he/she changed the date time on his/her computer "accidentally" and then
printed the document.

However, this denial is hardly bulletproof.

Firstly, we don't know what the extra codes mean, they could be a sequence number
of pages from that printer. It may just take a motivated researcher a bit of
time. Then it would be straightforward to pull other documents off that printer
and show that this document was not only out of date, but out of sequence - it
could not possibly be old unless all of the other documents preceding it were
forged.

Also, colors fade as cartridges empty (As do black cartridges). Given a sequence
of documents, it may be possible to do a rough ordering and for an expert to say
that there's no way that a particular document was printed on such and such a
date. Yes, the lawyer may lie about swapping cartridges randomly, but that's just
going to smell to a jury - especially without receipts.

Even if there is no evidence from the sequence of documents, and even if one
document is explainable, in an investigation of fraud, it would make sense to have
an expert witness review all of the filings of a particular lawyer printed on
his/her printer to see what else is out of sequence.

One "oops" might be explainable. Case after case showing documents inexplicably
mis-dated only when it's convenient, well, no jury is going to buy that.

And if a lawyer and clerk are engaged in a conspiracy to fake filing dates, then
they probably won't stop at just one. There will be a pattern, it will be
detectable, and there will also be some record of financial transactions.

This is where an expert can really come in handy.

Dan Diebolt added;

Apparently color laser copiers have the same feature as color laser printers. This
general technology was apparently developed years ago to address potential
counterfeiting. One article I read explained that some color laser printers will
not print simple black and white copies if the color reservoirs are empty. It is
way beyond the scope of this discussion group but the field of steganography is
probably highly developed. If you want to learn the deep dark secrets you probably
have to hang out with the likes of the EFF lead investigator Seth Schoen and
attend hacker conventions like Defcon or Chaos Communication Camp.

This discussion may seem technical and conspiratorial, but I personally have
caught several irregularities about when a document was mailed by closely
examining the cancellation and Pitney Bowes metering of envelopes. Attention to
extreme detail may be justified.

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