On Tuesday, 19 June 2018 14:05:58 UTC+1, NY wrote:
"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.

That's what I thought.


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.

I wouldn;t want to use a company that accepted such things for imporantn purposes, I;d prefer to actually have to post the item or have a signature witnessed.


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 :-)

Yep. so there's only one answer in these cases.


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.

Well I'd assume if you know the fax number and the person you are recieving the fax from and it's something like a solicitors office then that would be be relatively safe as you could get in touch with the origanator of the fax.

But for a number of documents my solicitor emailed me the documents so I could read them and sent the orginals in the post which had to be signed and returned to the office in person. They do NOT accept facsimiles or emails of these.


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.

Maybe they think your financial advisor is a trust worthy source.

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.

That's your problem then or the way you want it done.


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.

I was asked what bank account I wanted money transfered to, I assume they trust the person to give them the correct account details.


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.

Good for them I'd prefer that.

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.

It's a bit like Aples two step authentication then a good idea I'd have thought.
How happy would you be if I emailed your bank telling them that you chnaged bank account details and all you money should now be transfered into my account.



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


Yep, and I prefer security.