A perfectly forged bank statement can fool your eyes. But it can't fool metadata forensics.
While most landlords inspect bank statements visually—looking at numbers, logos, and formatting—fraudsters have gotten extremely good at making these elements match official documents. What they can't easily fake is what's hidden beneath the surface: the metadata.
In this guide, we'll explain why metadata analysis is the gold standard in document forensics, how it works, and why traditional reference checks completely miss these red flags.
According to forensic fraud studies, 89% of forged documents pass basic visual inspection. Why? Because Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat, and document generation software have become sophisticated enough to replicate bank branding perfectly. Visual inspection alone is no longer sufficient in 2025.
Metadata is data about data. It's the hidden information embedded in every digital file—invisible to the naked eye unless you know where to look. Every PDF contains metadata that tells a story:
Banks generate PDFs with specific metadata signatures that are nearly impossible to replicate manually. Forged documents, created in Word or edited in Acrobat, leave a completely different signature.
Real BARCLAYS bank statements are generated by BARCLAYS' proprietary PDF engine. When you inspect the metadata, it says "Creator: BARCLAYS PDF Engine" or similar. Forged statements say "Creator: Microsoft Word" or "Adobe Acrobat"—dead giveaway.
FORENSIC CHECK If a "June 2025 bank statement" was created in Microsoft Word on November 15, 2025, it's forged. Banks don't use Word to generate statements.
Real bank PDFs are created and never modified. If metadata shows a "created date" of June 15, 2025 but a "modified date" of October 20, 2025, someone edited the document post-generation. Banks never do this.
Red flag rule: Created date ≠ Modified date = Forged document, 99.5% of the time.
Banks generate monthly statements on the same date each month (e.g., 25th of the month). A "June 2025" statement should have a PDF creation date in late June. If it was created on November 20, 2025—5 months after the statement date—someone generated it retroactively, which is how forgers work.
Bank PDFs are heavily optimized for file size. A real 3-month BARCLAYS statement is typically 200-400 KB. Forged statements created in Word and exported to PDF are often 2-5 MB because the software doesn't optimize efficiently. File size tells a story.
Banks use specific, proprietary fonts. If the PDF metadata shows fonts like "Arial", "Times New Roman", or "Calibri"—generic fonts used in Microsoft Office—it's a red flag. Real bank statements use branded or specialized font families.
Fraudsters can replicate visual design, logos, and text. But they can't easily replicate the deep technical signatures that only official bank software generates. Metadata is the forensic fingerprint of every document.
Manual metadata analysis is possible but tedious—most landlords don't have the technical knowledge to extract and analyze metadata. This is where AI-powered forensics changes the game.
Advanced AI systems instantly extract and analyze all metadata fields from uploaded documents, comparing them against known bank signatures and flagging anomalies that indicate forgery. This analysis happens in seconds, identifying red flags that would take hours to spot manually.
ProperLet's AI forensics performs automated metadata verification across:
Your standard reference check company calls the applicant's employer or bank and verifies employment/account balances verbally. This catches nothing about document manipulation because they're not examining the documents themselves—they're just confirming verbal claims.
If a tenant submits a forged bank statement showing £5,000 balance, and your reference checker calls the bank asking "Does John Smith have an account?", the bank will confirm yes (because he does have an account). The reference checker never examines the submitted PDF, so they never catch the forged version.
Metadata forensics works differently: it analyzes the exact document the tenant submitted, revealing whether that specific file is authentic.
Document fraud is evolving. Forgers are using more sophisticated tools. But metadata forensics has a built-in advantage: the more advanced the forging tool, the more metadata traces it leaves behind.
A manually edited Photoshop file uploaded as PDF? Multiple red flags. A Word document with forged bank styling? Creator software reveals it instantly. An Acrobat-edited document? Modification dates betray the edit.
For landlords, the message is clear: stop trusting what you see, start trusting what's underneath. Metadata doesn't lie.
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