Word: documents
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Louisiana, to a flood of nearly 100 that turned up in Tuscaloosa, Ala. They totaled in the tens of thousands of dollars, and all were tracked down to one place: a private home in Vicksburg, Miss. There, police discovered a trove of high-tech gear that included a document scanner, a laser printer, an IBM-compatible computer and a disk filled with digitized checks, drivers' licenses and department store IDs. "The guy could copy anything he wanted," says Detective Reggie McCann of the Jackson, Miss., police. "It blew our minds...
...technique is remarkably simple. First, the forger uses an optical scanner to turn a legitimate document into a digital image stored in the computer's memory. Then, using a so-called paint program, which is an electronic version of an artist's drawing kit, he alters the image to suit his purposes -- adding zeros to the dollar amount, say, or deleting the payee's name and substituting his own. Finally, the altered document is printed out on a laser printer or, for best results, on a professional typesetting machine...
There are plenty of ways to defeat the desktop forger. The Standard Register company in Dayton, for example, sells a complete line of aids, from artificial watermarks that can be seen from an angle but are invisible to document scanners, to specially treated paper stock that, when tampered with, displays the word VOID in English, Spanish and Latin. But the counterfeiters do not seem daunted. A man in Boston used computer-faked checks and purchase orders to buy computer equipment. A couple in Phoenix made the rounds of the local liquor stores and check-cashing agencies with phony paychecks stamped...
Claire Angel, a Manhattan pianist, is active and healthy. Yet recently she had her lawyer draw up a living will, a signed, dated and witnessed document that allows people to state in advance their wishes regarding the use of life- sustaining procedures. Why such concern? "My life experience has prepared me to consider my own mortality," says Angel, 58, whose husband and mother are in nursing homes. "I would like to protect my children from having to make a difficult decision on my behalf...
Living wills usually serve two purposes: they describe what sort of physical condition is intended to trigger the document's provisions and list the types of treatment the person wishes to avoid. Experts recommend making the language as specific as possible, although there are no absolute guarantees. "You never know what a local prosecutor or doctor may do," says Giles Scofield, legal-services director of Concern for Dying. "There's no language that will always be perfect...