Research of signatures made on behalf of other persons

Abstract

The article is devoted to the handwriting examination of signatures made on behalf of fictitious persons (called also phantom signatures) and describes an experiment conducted at the department of criminalistics of the Ural State Law University named after V. F. Yakovlev. Main hypothesis of this experiment is the idea that the general characteristics of a person's own signature are to some extent transferred by him also to signatures made on behalf of fictitious, non-existent characters. Such an investigation is of applied importance because in expert practice it is often necessary to carry out handwriting expertise on signatures of non-existing persons.

The article begins with a justification of the relevance of the stated issue. After that, it presents a general description of the questionnaire survey conducted as part of this experiment. Further, the analysis of empirical data is presented. During the process of analysis, a number of interesting regularities are established: increase in the total length of phantom signatures relative to the respondents' own signatures; appearance and stable repetition of stroke and/or strokes in phantom signatures which are absent in their own; and others which are described in detail and consistently in the text of the paper. At the end, interim conclusions are formulated and tasks are set for further development of the stated issue, including expansion of qualitative and quantitative indicators of the respondent group, identification of regularities between other indicators revealed by the questionnaire, additional verification of the results obtained, etc.