contract-law
How to prove the genuinity/nongenuinity of a signature?
<p>I'm not a law student, but I'm very interested in the topic and learning in general. </p>

<p>I got curious about contracts and signatures recently, so I wondered if there have been cases where contracts have been voided because of invalid signatures. </p>

<p>What constitutes a person's official signature, and what are the criteria (if any) for the validation of one's signature?</p>

<h2>Contracts</h2>

<p><strong>A contract is not a piece of paper</strong>; it is an agreement intended to be legally binding between 2 or more people and it may be verbal or written or a combination of both.</p>

<p>That said, where a person has signed a document knowing that it contains contractual terms, in the absence of fraud that person is bound by the terms: it is immaterial whether the person signing reads the document or not.</p>

<p>So there are two reasons why a signed contract would not be binding:</p>

<ol>
<li>the person did not know it contained contractual terms</li>
<li>fraud.</li>
</ol>

<p>It is in the second case that the validity of the signature would matter. Fraud would have to be proved: it would not be sufficient to say "I did not sign that"; the person would need to demonstrate that a fraud has been perpetrated.</p>

<h2>Signatures</h2>

<p>Particularly today, with the ability to scan a signature it is trivially easy to affix anyone's signature to anything. </p>

<p>However, a party to a contract is entitled to rely <em>prima facie</em> on the validity of the signature. A person would have to provide evidence that it was not their signature or had been affixed without their knowledge or consent. </p>

<p>A court would look at the entire circumstances surrounding such a claim; if a person had, up until the dispute, acted as though they had signed the document then a court would probably not countenance an argument that they hadn't.</p>

<p>It is always possible to construct contrived circumstances where this or that could happen but, in reality, they are extremely rare. Unless you are dealing with a con-artist, you can trust the signature; if you are dealing with a con-artist, you have bigger problems.</p>

<p>See, the President has endorsed this answer:</p>

<p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DQbL3.png" rel="noreferrer"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/DQbL3.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
