What To Do if Your Name is Forged on the Title?
Introduction
Handwriting experts frequently deal with titles, deeds, and contracts where your name or signature has been forged, leaving you without your car or property.
What is a title?
Nowadays, most vehicle and motorcycle titles are printed on a unique document called a title. No matter where you live—in New York, Texas, or California—the state will mail you a title proving that you are the rightful owner. The state will give you a copy if you are the title owner. The title won’t be left in the glove box, will it? Because they’ll get your automobile if someone takes it.

What to do if your name is forged on the title?
Not to worry! You could recover your car, trailer, or house if someone falsified your name on a title.
- To demonstrate that your signature was faked, you must look at both your handwriting and signature on the back of the book.
- Identify the person you believe could have forged it. You might be able to identify the owner of the motorcycle, car, or watercraft. Bring all of the data to a handwriting specialist for a professional opinion.
- A lot of effort is required to become a forensic document examiner. You would need to attend hours and hours of classes, gather evidence to support your case before being allowed to testify in court, and earn the judge’s respect by demonstrating your proficiency in handwriting analysis. Make sure the expert you choose is a certified document examiner or a licensed handwriting expert with 115 court appearances if you want to locate the best expert for your case.
- Last but not least, regardless of whether you own the boat, you must submit a police report alleging that the title was forged and someone stole the boat. It is known as the Department of Motor Vehicles in California. In other states, It is known as the Department of Transportation.
- It would be great to let them know that you no longer own that title or that car. This is crucial because you can be held responsible if someone is killed in your car, and your insurance will have to make payments. As a result, when you no longer own the boat, automobile, or anything else, you must inform the DMV.
What is the role of handwriting experts?
If you have the original paper, we may examine every detail page, which makes our task simpler. You must utilize whatever duplicate you have if you don’t have the original. Since courts often follow the Best Evidence Law, even if we don’t have the original, it’s still the best evidence. With the help of the fact-finder, we shall ascertain the truth. Try to obtain the original.
Most expert witnesses are not for sale or to be hired. They are available for hire but will be updated regarding whether Jack signed that document. If Jack signed the document, they would claim that Jack did so. Janet did inherit the house from your grandma. Since I’m not a hired gun, the judges and jurors respect that as an expert witness, I’m only here, to tell the truth, which is why they do.
Put another way; you can’t pay people to say whatever you want. They’ll be honest with you. They will not testify for you if the signature is genuine. If the signature is fake, they will swear under oath that it is not yours.

The bottom line
It breaks my heart to watch people fight over automobiles for years. They’ll steal the vehicle and conceal it somewhere entirely different, perhaps even during a marital argument. If there is a family issue or if it is your brother-in-law, the courts will be involved, and if your brother-in-law has stolen a boat or forged your signature, they will assist you. You’ll need proof of such an occurrence at that point to support your claim. You might bring in a forensic handwriting expert like me, and I’d claim that John forged John’s signature and that it was never legitimate.
As a company, we’ve seen this happen 20,000 times. The most common thing is real estate property deeds. Of course, with real estate property deeds, it’s all about as easy as $5 million on the table. That’s what somebody would say about it – like, “Hey Janet! My grandma gave me this house.” But there are always some so-called nieces who aren’t Janet.
Why did Janet get the house? Maybe someone forged it. Maybe Grandma put down unreadable signatures, which were signed off on by someone else, or maybe something needed to be added in translation when she passed it along to her niece. That’s why they use handwriting experts and document examiners to ensure that an original is legitimate. They can transfer ownership of the deed back to themselves or their family members if anyone has more entitlement to it than anybody else.
If your name has been forged, please contact one of us. Find someone in your area by visiting handwritingexperts.com or handwritingexpertusa.com. Most likely, you won’t require a local. Today, PDF and electronic files are used for most of our work. We would be pleased to send someone to your place to look at an original under a microscope.
Forensic handwriting specialist Bart Baggett has been doing this for 30 years. He has made more than a hundred court appearances. More often than you think, forged titles and deeds have been observed. It involves a family member most frequently and is considerably more typical than you might imagine. That’s disappointing, isn’t it?
If you call, we’ll put you in touch with one of our professionals.
Best wishes for your forged document case.
- Published in Client Reviews, Forgery
What Do You Do When A Car Dealer Forges Your Signature?
Use car salesmen often get a bad rap. And, for good reason. The automotive dealer industry is filled with the lowest form of salesmen and often has very low margins to work with. While it might seem like a “good deal”, the extra that you don’t know you are paying for is very profitable for both new and used car salesmen.
But, even if you get a good deal… what happens when you get a lemon?
First, you probably signed away most of your rights when you drive off the lot. Secondly, even the paperwork you didn’t sign… someone else could have signed your name. You won’t find that out until you sue them for the repairs the car required that were hidden from you.
It can be a scary thought to think that someone could forge your signature and claim it was you later in court.
But it is also very possible. In fact, it happens all the time in every state. Automotive dealerships are often in court defending paperwork that a customer did or did not sign? Did you buy that extended warranty? Did you see the Carafe? Your signature is on the paper… so it must be true.
In this blog post, we will discuss why signatures are so important and how you can avoid being a victim of forgery.
Signatures have been used for centuries as a way of signaling consent and decision-making authority. They continue to play an important role today not just in contracts or financial agreements but also in legal agreements such as wills or powers of attorney. In fact, many people believe that they do not need to worry about their signatures being forged.
However, this is a dangerous belief to have. In the United States alone, it is estimated that signature forgery results in losses of billions of dollars every year. This is because forged signatures can be used to commit all sorts of fraud, from taking out loans in another person’s name to falsifying tax returns.
It is also very common when buying a car. Car dealers sometimes forge documents to avoid actually disclosing that the vehicle you’re about buy is damaged in some way. Car dealers may also forge your name to make more money and reduce their own liability.
In Maryland, a car dealership was forging customer names on documents to cancel gap insurance for a customer. When the customer got into an accident and totaled her car, the insurance company did not give her enough money to repay the bank. Thus the customer called the gap insurance company to cover the difference.
When the customer called the gap insurance company, they informed her that she did not have any coverage. A few days after the customer bought the car, the dealership called the gap insurance company and canceled the coverage. The dealership used the money that the customer paid for the gap insurance to make more money on her car purchase.
It happens all the time.
So how do you prevent these kinds of forgeries when buying a car? Here are 3 easy tips.
1. Sign your full name clearly and legibly. Do not use a symbolic or simplified signature. It might take 5 minutes longer, but it will be much hard to forge and dealerships will NOT attempt it unless your signatures are a bunch of squiggles.
2. When you sign any paperwork, take out your mobile phone and take a clear full photograph of the paperwork before you hand it over to the dealership. This will be your life-saver. Take a photo of the pages you did NOT sign, too.
3. If you are buying a car, call the bank or the lending institution a few days after you buy the car to make sure that the paperwork the lending institution has, matches your paperwork.
If their paperwork doesn’t match what you have, then perhaps someone forged your documents. Make sure that the monthly payment, interest rate, amount financed, and other terms of the loan that the finance company received match the terms you agreed to. Even if the monthly payment is off by a few cents, it may mean that someone changed the terms and forged your signature on a new document.
If a document was forged, you may need to hire a Forensic Document Examiner to prove that your signature was forged.
This article was written by Brett Goldstein and Bart Baggett. Both are court-qualified forensic handwriting experts and have dealt with both clients and dealerships in forgery cases. Call today to discuss your car dealership forgery case.
- Published in Criminal Cases
Where did the phrase “Make Your Mark” come from?
The age of the quill pen is long past us, like the age of the horse and buggy. Even though we’re still using pens and pencils now and 30 years, we might be a lost art. So, you still have to determine how people can make their mark. You know that would mark me though I make their mark, tell me you do know
I could make it up, but I would never lie to you. Yeah, of course. What does it mean? Imprint? Make your imprint and make your impression.
Right? No, what do you mean? Well, colloquially it means to make a splash you know make your mark on society. Yeah, the impression most people in the Middle Ages couldn’t write. So, you just did like a stamp? Yeah, it’s not a stamp. They couldn’t write. So by making your mark that gave them a piece of coal, and they would make a mark as their signature. So that’s what made us it was really it was the first signatures was the mark. Eventually, like well, that Mark looks like his mark. Well, that Mark looks like a net. So, they started customizing their mark, which became an autograph.
- Published in Client Reviews
Do you need to hire a handwriting expert?
If you are an attorney, you are probably already familiar with hiring an expert witness for your case. Choosing the right expert witness is important. Most attorneys have worked with expert witnesses at some point in their career, but most haven’t hired a Forensic Document Examiner.
If your case involves a forged check, a last will and testament, a pre-nuptial agreement, a contract, or a signature that doesn’t seem to be authentic, you should be looking for a Forensic Document Examiner.
You should know a couple of things before you make your first phone call to a Forensic Document Examiner. First of all, how many documents do you need to be analyzed? These are the documents that you and your client think may be forged or not authentic. The Forensic Document Examiner will refer to these as “questioned documents”. This is important to know since the Forensic Document Examiner will charge a fee per questioned document.
Most Forensic Document Examiners charge a flat rate between $600 – $1500 for a written opinion of one or two documents. Rates do vary depending on the number of questioned documents. Attorneys can also request a retainer. Retainers can vary, but are normally $2,500 and most are non-refundable. You should download the fees from the Forensic Document Examiner’s website to avoid any surprises.
You will also need to provide samples of your client’s known handwriting so the Forensic Document Examiner can compare them against the questioned document(s). These exemplars are commonly referred to as Known Documents. The known documents should be from the same time frame and you should provide as many known documents as you can. For a Forensic Document Examiner to do the best job possible, the known samples should also be a high-quality copy. No one is going to win a case by looking at a poor fax copy.
Do you have to hire a local Forensic Document Examiner?
Most attorneys and clients feel they have to hire someone in their own hometown. However, this simply isn’t true anymore. Most cases these days can be inspected through high-resolution scans, email, faxes, and overnight mail. Since the Covid-19 situation, courts around the country are accepting zoom testimony from both attorneys and expert witnesses. This expands your ability to hire the best in the USA and not restrict yourself to a local expert.
If your case involves originals, and the originals can’t be sent overnight, then you might incur an additional travel expense so the Forensic Document Examiner can review the original documents.
Is it worth it to hire a Forensic Document Examiner and pay them to travel?
Hiring a Forensic Document Examiner is like buying a parachute. You never want to buy a parachute based on the lowest price. You would always want to buy the safest parachute regardless of cost. Hiring a Forensic Document Examiner is no different. You want the most qualified and experienced examiner for your case and not the examiner who is the closest. You can tell who the most qualified and experienced examiner is by looking at their Curriculum Vitae. That is just a fancy word for resume.
If you are looking to hire a Forensic Document Examiner for your case, contact us now to schedule an appointment. https://handwritingexpertdallas.com
This article was written by Mari Baggett
- Published in Criminal Cases