Author(s): Sam Han

Abstract: In 2016, Emmy Award winning host John Oliver reported on the debt-collection industry, in which he exposed fraud being committed on a massive scale. That same fraud-prevalent industry has been the subject of numerous investigations and penalties imposed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). Because the fraudulent behaviors of debt collectors have been exposed through lawsuits and reports from various media outlets, debt collectors now employ more sophisticated evidence-manufacturing techniques in pursuit of their collection efforts. Those techniques are so convincing that consumers face resistance from courts that routinely enter adverse judgments against the consumers based on the manufactured evidence. This paper introduces reliable mathematical procedures (namely, modulo operations) to reliably detect irregularities in paper documents that demonstrate that there was some intervening manipulation of an original electronic file (either by human hands or by a computer program) before generating the paper printout. The novelty of using modulo arithmetic is that the mathematics alone permits detection of pre-printing manipulation without the use of metadata.

DOI: 10.22271/2790-0673.2025.v5.i2e.258

Pages: 441-449 | Views: 110 | Downloads: 53

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