While you are reading this, a con-artist could easily forge a notary’s seal on a fraudulent deed and sell your elderly parents’ home to an unwitting buyer. Your parents will regain ownership only after a costly lawsuit, and a title insurance company will be forced to take the loss and reimburse the innocent buyer. In another scam, prosecutors recently leveled charges against two men, who impersonated architects and engineers and placed fake professional stamps on 1000s of construction documents. The city does not keep these documents, and if the posers’ buildings collapse in the next earthquake, insurance companies will pay out millions. We rely on professional stamps to provide trust in commerce. We ask notaries, engineers, architects and other professionals to protect us from dangerous deception, yet we expect them to do this with 13th Century technology that provides no obstacles to the schemes of 21st Century con-artists. These stamps create a false veneer of validity that we rely on…to our detriment. In one recent year, a major title insurance company needlessly lost $265M to fraud, and another loses approximately $12M each year in SoCal alone. Annually, the City of Los Angeles issues permits on 170,000 construction projects, each of which requires an average of 5 professional stamps for a total of 850,000 unvalidated stamps. Every.Single.Year. Veritable will improve the usefulness of the professional stamps of notaries, architects and engineers. Our smart phone app will use blockchain technology to empower these professionals by simplifying existing processes and eliminating stamp forgery entirely.
