Offense of Forgery and making of false documents under the Indian Law

Forgery is a Criminal offence in India and is mentioned in Section 463 in chapter XVIII [Of
Offences relating to documents and to Property Marks] of Indian Penal Code.

FORGERY UNDER IPC

Forgery under IPC means “Whoever makes any false documents or false electronic record or part
of a document or electronic record, with intent to cause damage or injury, to the public or to any
person, or to support any claim or title, or to cause any person to part with property, or to enter
into any express or implied contract, or with intent to commit fraud or that fraud may be
committed, commits forgery.” 1

INGREDIENTS
MAKING OF FALSE DOCUMENTS

• Making of false document constitutes forgery. What amounts to making of false document
is mentioned in section 464 of IPC.2
• The making of a false document is a sine qua non for committing the offense of forgery. 3
• Section 464 talks about a person with malafide intent,
• making or executing a document causing to be believed that it was made or executed by
some other person or by authority of some other person or,
• altering any material part of the document without lawful authority
• causes any person to sign, execute or alter any document form a person who could not by
reason of unsound of mind, intoxication or deception know the contents of the document.

EXPLANATION OF THE INGRIDENTS

TO CAUSE DAMAGE OR INJURY TO THE PUBLIC OR TO ANY PERSON

There must be intention to cause some damage or injury to public or and individual.

1 Indian Penal Code, Section 463.

2 Indian Penal Code, Section 464
3 Page 1117 Ratanlal and Dhirajlal, The Indian Penal Code, Thirty Fourth Edition, 2014.
For e.g. If A alters a clause of the deed without intention to causes any damage to any person then
it will not be considered forgery.

Thus, intention is key of the offence. The word fraudulently and dishonestly shows that intention
is required and these are defined in Section 25 & 24 of Indian Penal Code respectively. It is
immaterial whether damage, injury or fraud is actually caused or not.8 So injury or intent to cause
injury needs to be proved.

SUPPORT ANY CLAIM OR TITLE

The illustrations (f), (g), (h) and (i) make it clear that even if a man has a legal claim or title to
property, he will be liable for the offence of forgery if he counterfeits documents in order to support
it.

An actual intention to convert an illegal or doubtful claim into an apparently legal claim is
dishonest and will constitute the offence of forgery. 4

The word claim does not only mean claim on property it can be claim on anything like custody of
child or admission in a university.

TO CAUSE ANY PERSON TO PART WITH PROPERTY

This means that to make any person remove from possession of any property or give it up or sell
or anything to make him part from that. It is not necessary that the property exist at the time when
a person is made to be part with the property.5

INTENT TO COMMIT FRUAD

The word “defraud” includes an element of deceit. Deceit is not an ingredient of the definition of
the word “dishonestly” while it is an important ingredient of the definition of the word
“fraudulently”. The former involves a pecuniary or economic gain or loss while the latter by
construction excludes that element. Further) the juxtaposition of the two expressions
“‘dishonestly” and “fraudulently” used in the various sections of the Code indicates their close

4 Maheshchandra Prasad, (1943) 22 Pat. 292

5 Sashi bhushan, (1893) 15 All 210
affinity and therefore the definition of one may give color to the other. To illustrate, in the
definition of “dishonestly”, wrongful gain or wrongful loss is the necessary enough. So too, if the
expression “fraudulently’ were to be held to involve the element of injury to the person or persons
deceived, it would be reasonable to assume that the injury should be something other than
pecuniary or economic loss. Though almost always an advantage to one causes loss to another and
vice versa, it need not necessarily be so. 6 Should we hold that the concept of fraud” would include
not only deceit but also some injury to the person deceived, it would be appropriate to hold by
analogy drawn from the definition of “dishonestly” that to satisfy the definition of “‘fraudulently”
it would be enough if there was a non- economic advantage to the deceiver or a non-economic loss
to the deceived. Both need not co-exist.

The expression ‘fraud’ involves two elements, deceit and injury to the person deceived. Injury is
something other than economic loss, that is, deprivation of property, whether movable or
immovable or of money and it will include and any harm whatever caused to any person in body,
mind, reputation or such others. In short, it is a non- economic or non- pecuniary loss. A benefit
or advantage to the deceiver, will almost always cause loss or detriment to the deceived. Even in
those rare cases where there is a benefit or advantage to the deceiver, but no corresponding loss to
the deceived, the second condition is satisfied. 7

PUNISHMENT FOR FORGERY

Section 465 prescribes punishment for forgery as maximum of 2 years imprisonment or fine or
both. The ingredients of section 463 need to be fulfilled for committing any person under section
465. Forgery or fraud are essentially mattering of evidence which could be proved as a fact by
direct evidence or inferences by proved facts.8

MODERN CONTEXT OF FORGERY

In the modern context forgery is a very much of prevalent crime because of use of advance
computer technologies to forge a document. These forgeries are very difficult to trace. They can
be traced by cross checking it with some existing proof if it comes in the light that a particular

6 The Indian penal code by S.N. Misra, Central Law publications, 20th edtion
7 (1963) 2 Cr.LJ 434
8 Indian Bank v. Satyam Fibres pvt. Ltd., AIR 1996 SC 2592
document one is dealing with is forged. For example, in case of forgery of prescription the medical
stores can crosscheck with the doctors.

Forgery can be as small as faking your mothers’ signature on a note justifying your absence from
school or as big as in the famous case of literary forgery which took place with the 1983
"discovery" of the alleged "Hitler Diaries." The diaries supposedly contained passages written by
Adolf Hitler between 1932 and 1945. The diaries were actually written by a forger named Konrad
Kujau in the early 1980's.9

In this era, Digital Image Forgery has been increasingly easy to perform, so the reliabil ity of the
image is thus becoming an important issue to be focus on. It does not differ very much in nature
to conventional image forgery. Instead of using photograph digital image forgery deals with the
digital image. By using the tool such as Adobe Photoshop, GIMP, Coral Paint fake images can be
created as some of the tools are open source. 10 Image forgery may lead to hazards. In banking
system image forgery is a big threat, this result into big frauds. Nowadays detecting these types of
forgeries has become very useful to reduce these problems at present. To determine whether a
digital image is original is a big challenge. To find the marks of tampering in a digital image is a
challenging task. Tampering is normally done to cover objects in an image in order to either
produce false proof or to make the image more pleasant for appearance. 11 There are many cases in
digital image forgery, all this cases are classified into three categories based on the process of
creating fake images the group are image retouching, and image splicing, copy-move attack. Image
forgery is basically a modification of image to conceal some meaningful or useful information.
The common manipulations of a digital image are copy-move and cut-paste forgery.

The different methods of forgery detection include examination, authentication and verification.
Multiple methods of detection may be used to correctly identify a single forgery. More than one
opinion on the results of detection methods also may be needed to confirm that a forgery has
definitely occurred. Detection of forgery through examination, authentication and verification may
be used to identify almost any type of forgery, including handwritten forgery, counterfeit forgery,
digital forgery and art forgery.

9 http://criminal.findlaw.com/criminal-charges/forgery.html
10 Image forgery detection by Hany Farid
11 Ibid
Forgery detection by examination involves looking closely at an object to determine if it is valid.
For example, to check an art piece for signs of forgery, an examiner may look for indications that
the piece was not created in a specific time period. If a piece of supposedly antique art is in a new
wood frame or machine-made nails were used in a supposedly aged frame, these signs of forgery
may be detected through an examination.

Forgery detection by authentication will use tests to conclude if an item is real. Authentication
must be carried out with a measurable test. 12 For example, methods of authentication on suspected
forged art may include carbon dating, X-ray diffraction and infrared analysis. Some methods of
authentication are more reliable than others, and newly released authentication tests usually must
be backed up with another reliable test until the new tests are proved reliable. 13

Forgery detection through verification involves obtaining confirmation and locating evidence to
conclusively determine if forgery has occurred. Verification is often used to detect forged e-mails
for job scams; the receiver of the e-mail may simply look up the information of the company or
call a representative of the company to confirm whether the e-mail is real.14 A check can be verified
by depositing the check in a bank and waiting for it to clear, and a signature may be verified if
witnesses can swear or prove they were present when a document was signed.

With so many types of forgery used to create counterfeit art, money and financial documents, one
suspected forgery may have to go through examination, authentication and verification before it
can be reasonably identified as real or fake. In some instances, even after the suspected item has
been completely reviewed, an argument about its authenticity can continue. As counterfeiters learn
more and more advanced ways to create forgeries, the technology of forgery detection has had to
advance, as well. The science of forgery detection continues to evolve with new methods of
examination, authentication and verification.

12 IJSTR VOLUME 2, ISSUE 11, NOVEMBER 2013 ,A Survey On Various Methods To Detect Forgery And
Computer Crime In Transaction Database by Pratik Patel, Shailendra Mishra
13 www.sciencedirect.com
14 Detecting Forgery: Forensic Investigation of Documents by Joe Nickell
CONCLUSION, CRITICISM AND SUGGESTIONS
Forgery is a crime of altering, counterfeiting or making of fake documents for the purpose of
deceiving any person. The main objective of forgery is to gain something illegally or to cause
someone wrongful loss. Forgery is basically an economic crime so it is done only for monetary
benefit mostly. Forgery is basically an act of defrauding somebody by use of fake documents.

Forgery is called a white-collar crime because it is a non-violent crime which is done only for
financial gain. White collar crime was first defined by sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a
crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his
occupation".15

White-collar crime shall constitute those classes of non-violent illegal activities which principally
involve traditional notions of deceit, deception, concealment, manipulation, breach of trust,
subterfuge or illegal circumvention.

Things that can be forged includes mainly of but are not limited to wills, patent, cheque, signature,
pieces of art, deeds, stock certificate etc.

A criminal record for forgery is very damaging because it can hinder many aspects of day to day
living, from getting credit to obtaining employment opportunities. The only way to avoid these
frightening prospects is to get a criminal defense attorney who will aggressively seek to discredit
the evidence of the prosecution and law enforcement.

The stringent laws can be helpful for the crime of forgery. It is very important for us to make
lawful detection techniques which abide by law so as to not be self-incriminatory. So, from my
point of view a cross checking phenomena devised to check every forgery will be very important.
Also the digitalization of the public records will be helpful because to do forgery a very advanced
hacking skill will be necessary, so ordinary men will not be able to forge it.

There is already existing laws of forgery which are pretty much stringent so nothing can be done
in making new laws. To curb the forgery there are many methods which can range from very

15 Edwin H. Sutherland, White Collar Crime: The Uncut Version (1983).

complex forensics techniques to very simple analyzing techniques. So, in banks or schools or
universities these methods can be taught to people who are working there in there training sessions.

Another one can be a way to aware people of crime and punishment of forgery. So, there may not
be sufficient means present to detect the modern-day techniques of forgery but by teaching people
and making more professionals in the field of forgery by inculcating more courses then the problem
can be solved.