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Seen as (unsigned) PDFs are basically images of documents, it's wild to claim that there are no forgeries, anyone doing a good ole fake document, fake diploma, fake wire transfer, fake articles of incorporation, etc... is using a pdf for faking. A nigerian prince scam sending an attachment mentioning 15.000.000$ locked up in inheritance would constitute a PDF forgery.
Gwern is talk about editing an existing pdf. Less so about creating one from scratch.
Not quite the scenario described (it wasn't an academic paper), but https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/73317.html is my experience of dealing with a forged PDF. Part of the reason it's rare is that it's actually very hard to do it well!
was linked in the article!
I believe it's actually linked in the OP about half way down. What a crazy thing for an agent to do - to turn a minor disagreement into a maybe-crime.
Gwern, in case you are reading this, there's a typo in:
Specifically "epxperts"
Offtopic but the damage caused to an entire generation by Gwern's nicotine article is truly astounding. Obviously he's not responsible for the actions of others and it was written with good intentions but wow.
Are you talking about vapes?
I have no sense of gwen's readership numbers, but I find it unlikely that one rather erudite blog has anything to do with global nicotine consumption. People have been smoking for centuries. The vaping industry had guerilla marketing campaigns to target college kids.
No rain drop thinks it is responsible for the flood, but I am hard-pressed to imagine a blog article greatly swayed hearts and minds.
https://gwern.net/nicotine
This one?
It seems to be listing the pros and cons of nicotine and is well-sourced...
What "damage" do you see caused by this article?
I think a big reason for this is that PDF editing tools are just pretty terrible.
PDFs are meant to be a presentation document format, not an editable document format. I have some experience editing PDFs, and it's difficult to make significant modifications. Editing small sections of text or replacing a date is fine, but once you try to start editing entire paragraphs or changing the layout, it quickly becomes unmanageable. The kerning looks weird, the spacing between words looks off, and when you look into it you realize the the sentence you're trying to edit is actually split across a dozen text objects. For these it becomes almost impossible to edit without destroying the spacing, so you just give up.
And the approved way to edit these PDFs is via Adobe Acrobat Pro, which costs $20/month (ugh), which I'm not willing to pay for.
So I think this is why we just don't see that many PDF forgeries. The editing tools just aren't very good. Maybe it's different now we can just ask Claude to edit our PDFs for us.
PDF's are not Presentation Document Format. Should be "Portable".
The flip side to this is that when you do come across a forged PDF (and I have!), they can be really, really effective. Nobody expects them. There are usually tells in the metadata, but... there don't have to be.
I agree that you won't find forged PDF documents in the wild with any type of frequency, but they are forged in private settings. Forged or doctored bank statements are relatively more common. FinCEN identifies altered bank statements alongside W-2s, tax returns, gift letters, and employment information as examples of documents involved in mortgage fraud [1]. In March 2026, a mortgage loan officer was even charged by federal prosecutors with altering and creating bank statements to make borrowers appear qualified for a mortgage [2].
[1] https://www.fincen.gov/mortgage-loan-fraud
[2] https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/licensed-mortgage-loan-...