A friend has owed me a significant amount of money for several months and keeps giving new explanations for why the transfer supposedly cannot reach my German bank account. When I asked for evidence, he sent two PDF bank statements showing transfers that never arrived. I do not want to upload documents containing personal information to an unknown AI service. I checked the PDF metadata and found: created 10.09.26, modified 14.09.26, application Mozilla Firefox 155.0.1, and PDF producer cairo 1.18.4. These appear to have been generated with Firefox's print-to-PDF feature. Does anything in this metadata suggest the documents were altered, and is there a reliable way to prove whether they are fake?
2 Answers
Those metadata details are not suspicious by themselves. Firefox can generate a PDF from a webpage using the Cairo PDF library, and the creation and modification dates can reflect when the file was produced or saved. Metadata alone cannot establish that a statement is genuine.
A PDF can be made to display almost anything if someone changes the webpage before printing it, so even a convincing-looking document is not proof that a transfer happened. The practical verification is to contact your bank and ask whether any incoming payment was received or rejected, and ask your friend for the official transaction reference or confirmation from the bank. Also compare the transfer details with the account information you provided; a transfer to incorrect details may never reach you.
That makes sense. I was hoping the file details would give me something concrete to discuss with him, but it sounds like the bank would be the only reliable source of confirmation.