"whisky-dave" wrote in message
...
I have savings with one company who will accept a fax of a signed
letter
in lieu of it being sent by post, but will not accept an emailed scan
of
the same letter. Work that one out! They are both images of the same
written document, just sent via different technology.

Good reason to dump those dinosaurs.

faxes are more difficult to fake, I wouldn't dump them, I'd rather they
are careful than just accepting anyhting as proof.
It's not like emails are dufficult to forge.

Faxes are dead easy to forge if you have the will and the intent. When I had
to fax a letter of authority to cash in some of my savings, I didn't use a
dedicated fax machine because I don't have one and I wasn't going to make a
special journey into town to pay to use the one in library. Instead I used
the fax modem in my laptop and "printed" a scan of the signed letter - I
faxed exactly the same scan that I would have emailed to them if they'd have
accepted emails: identical data sent by a different means.

If I'd had criminal intent I could have pasted a scan of someone else's
signature copied from a scan of another unrelated document - easier and less
obvious if you do it digitally rather than with scissors and glue :-)

I think companies only accept faxed authorisation on the incorrect
assumption that all faxes come from dedicated scan-and-fax devices, without
any intermediate computer process that could manipulate the scan.


The situation is even more absurd nowadays. As long as I email my signed
document to a financial advisor (whom I've never met, only corresponded with
by email) for him to forward to the share-dealing desk, it is accepted. If I
send the same scan directly to the dealing desk, it is not. Given that the
advisor has never met me or witnessed me sign anything, it's placing a
spurious level of trust on the route by which the document has been sent.

Not that I'm complaining. They have my postal address, email address and
bank details on file, and would almost certainly refuse to send money to a
different account unless I sent them a voided cheque as proof of owning the
account.

Having recently moved house, I've had to do a lot of changing of my address
on various companies' databases. Most will accept authorisation over the
phone (if it's membership of a society or subscription to a magazine rather
than anything financial) but some require me to write in. One would only
accept the authorisation if I quoted an ID that they posted to me old
address and which I then received via a Royal Mail redirection.

As with so many things, it's a trade-off between security to the company and
convenience to the punter.