Detect a fake
bank statement

Recompute it. Opening balance plus credits minus debits must give the closing balance, and every running balance must follow from the one before. Then check that the account holder is the applicant, that the account matches the rest of the case, and that the statement was produced the way that bank produces its statements. A fraudster who edits one amount has to make all of that agree, and that is rarely done.

Often, but not from the file alone. Editing tools leave traces: a producer that is not the bank's software, a modification date after the creation date, a font on one line that is used nowhere else, text laid over text. Those traces open an enquiry. A re-export or a scan erases them in good faith too, so Holofin never treats them as proof on their own: the recomputed balances and the rest of the case confirm or clear it.

A generated statement can be arithmetically correct, so the balance checks alone will not always catch it. What it rarely gets right is the bank's production fingerprint, and it still has to agree with the payslips, the employment contract and the identity document in the same case. A fabricated salary that no payslip supports is a signal whatever tool made the PDF.

The arithmetic and the consistency checks run on the extracted values, so they work on scans and photos as well as on native PDFs. The file analysis has less to go on with a scan, because a scan has no editing history, and Holofin says so instead of guessing.

The balance recomputation and the case consistency checks work on any statement that prints an opening balance, transactions and a closing balance, whatever the bank or the language. The bank fingerprint check needs genuine statements from that bank to compare against; where it has none, it stays silent rather than raise a false alarm.

No. Holofin raises signals, explains each one with the values compared, and ranks them by strength. The thresholds and the decision stay with your team. In the EU, the GDPR restricts decisions based solely on automated processing that have legal effects on a person (article 22), and calling a document forged is a decision for people, not for an engine.

Yes, in most jurisdictions. In the UK, submitting a falsified statement to obtain credit is fraud by false representation under the Fraud Act 2006. In the US, a false statement on a loan application to a federally insured lender falls under 18 U.S.C. 1014. That is why the signals Holofin returns are evidence for your team to review, with each value traced to its page and line.

Where the applicant can connect their account, data read directly from the bank removes the document and the forgery risk with it. Statements remain for applicants who cannot or will not connect, for accounts the aggregator does not reach, and for files that arrive by email or upload. Those are the statements worth checking.