A friend owes me a substantial amount of money and has repeatedly given different explanations for why he supposedly cannot transfer it to my German bank account. After I asked for proof, he sent two PDF statements claiming that transfers were made, but the money never arrived. I do not want to upload the documents to an untrusted AI service because they contain personal information. Adobe shows the following metadata: created 10.09.26, modified 14.09.26, application Mozilla Firefox 155.0.1, and PDF producer cairo 1.18.4. Is anything suspicious about those details, and is there a safe way to determine whether the documents were altered?
3 Answers
If the money never appeared in your account, treat the transfer as unconfirmed regardless of what the document says. You can inspect a copy locally with a PDF tool, but that may reveal inconsistencies rather than prove fraud. For stronger evidence, preserve the messages and files, contact the bank through its official channels, and consider getting legal advice about recovering the debt. Avoid uploading the documents to unknown online services.
A same-country transfer within Germany would normally have a transaction reference, date, amount, recipient details, and a bank-generated record. The safest practical check is to ask your own bank whether any incoming transfer is pending or was rejected, then ask the sender for the official transaction confirmation or reference number. Do not rely on screenshots or a PDF created from a browser page.
Those metadata entries are not proof that the statement is genuine or fake. Firefox can use Cairo when printing a webpage to PDF, and the modified date can simply reflect when the file was created, exported, downloaded, or handled later. Metadata is easy to change and is not a reliable record of what happened at the bank.
So the details alone cannot really confirm whether he edited the document. I was hoping there would be something definitive I could show him.