Font gives away fake document but it’s blamed on time travel

Office-Watch.comLast updated: 19 April 2023

Fonts,Microsoft Office,Microsoft Office for Mac,Microsoft Outlook,Microsoft Word,Office 365

Here’s another case of someone trying to backdate fake documents and being caught by hidden details in the file. The font is the giveaway but not in the usual way.

It’s the ongoing saga of Craig Wright, once a big name in the cyber-currency game. He’s now involved in a court case about the alleged theft of Bitcoin from a computer scientist, the late David Kleiman. Mr Kleiman has been named as one of the secretive creators of Bitcoin, a claim that’s disputed.

Part of Wright’s defence is a ‘2012’ trust document sent to the US District Court in Florida as a PDF with embedded fonts.

Font embedded into a PDF

A close look at the document showed that it could not have been made in 2012 because it uses a version of the Calibri font released in 2015. See the Copyright date on the Calibri font.

Calibri font has been the trap for other attempts to fake and back-date documents. It’s been involved in Pakistani politics and bankruptcy in Canada among many. In those cases, the documents using Calibri are supposed to exist before the font was created.

Calibri was created during 2002-2004 but only released to the public in 2007. It became widely used in Office 2007 and Windows Vista becoming the default font in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

Not just the font, but the version

This case is a little different. The trust document is supposed to be signed 2012 (when Calibri existed) but the PDF uses a version of Calibri not released until 2015.