Arthur Nelson Protected His Wyoming Mountain Cabin with a Trust
I turned the sheet over. At the bottom of the page, on the line marked Principal, was my signature. The slant of the letters, the sharp cross on the ‘t’, and the rounded ‘N’ were identical to the way I had written my name for forty years. It was a perfect match to the signature on my driver’s license.
“This signature is a very careful copy, but it is not yours,” Rebecca said.
I touched the printed ink on the page, my fingernail scraping against the dry paper. The date of the notary stamp was February twelfth, a Tuesday I spent packing boxes in my old garage while Cornelius loaded his SUV in the driveway. I had never met the notary listed on the seal.
“How did he do this?” I asked.
“With high-resolution scanning, it is simple to transfer a signature from a valid document onto a new template,” she said. “If the notary is a friend, or simply careless, they register the stamp without verifying the physical presence of the signer. It happens more often than you think with out-of-state transactions.”
