This module describes the kinds of inconsistencies that tend to show up in an altered document, at a level general enough to help you recognize a problem without providing a guide to producing one. If you ever find yourself thinking about how a specific alteration was likely made, redirect that attention toward verification instead — confirming a document independently makes the question of how it might have been altered irrelevant.
The most frequent sign of a problem is not that a document looks fake — genuinely altered documents are often visually convincing — but that it doesn't agree with itself or with the rest of the file. Numbers that don't reconcile against each other within the same document, formatting or fonts that shift partway through a document that should be uniform, dates that don't fit a plausible sequence, or an employer name, address or logo that doesn't match what appears elsewhere in the file are all worth a second look.
None of these, on their own, proves anything. People make typos, companies rebrand, and templates get reused imperfectly. The signal worth acting on is a pattern — more than one small inconsistency clustering in the same document or the same file — rather than a single imperfection in isolation.
A document's reliability increases enormously when it can be checked against an independent source — a bank statement against the bank's own online portal or a call to the institution, an employment letter against a call to the employer using a number you found independently rather than one printed on the letter, a Notice of Assessment against the CRA's own systems where the lender has a process to do so. A document that resists this kind of cross-check — an employer with no verifiable phone number or online presence, a bank whose name doesn't match any institution operating in Canada, a reference that can't actually be reached — deserves more attention, not less, especially where something else about the file already feels inconsistent.
This is the single most reliable principle in this entire course: independent verification beats visual inspection every time. A document can be made to look completely convincing. A phone call to an independently sourced number, or a lender's own income-verification service, is much harder to fake.
Real financial life is usually a little messy — pay varies slightly with overtime or shift differentials, account balances fluctuate, deposits land on slightly irregular dates. A document that is unusually, suspiciously tidy — perfectly round deposit amounts, an income figure that lands exactly on the number needed to qualify, a balance that appears exactly once at exactly the right moment — is not proof of anything by itself, but it is a pattern worth noticing rather than a coincidence to wave away.
At the point where something looks off, your job is not to confront the client, accuse anyone, or try to determine conclusively what happened. It's to slow down, verify independently wherever you can, and if the concern doesn't resolve through legitimate verification, escalate it through your brokerage's compliance process. Module 07 walks through exactly what that escalation looks like and what your reporting obligations are once a genuine concern remains.
A pay stub shows perfectly round numbers for both gross pay and net pay, on a document where the font in the year-to-date totals looks slightly different from the font used elsewhere on the page. What is the appropriate response?
Neither the round numbers nor the font inconsistency proves fraud individually, but together they form exactly the kind of pattern this module describes — and the correct response is independent verification, not either blind acceptance or an accusation you can't yet support. The tempting wrong answer treats a single anomaly as automatically meaningless, but the point of pattern-recognition is that clustered small inconsistencies are more significant than any one of them alone.
