Why does my official document show INCONCLUSIVE?
If your document was issued by a real institution – a state register, a court, a bank, a payroll system – and HTPBE? returns INCONCLUSIVE instead of INTACT, that does not mean the document is forged. It means HTPBE? cannot structurally prove that the file was not modified after creation. The document may well be genuine; the verdict reflects the limits of structural analysis, not the document itself.
Why a genuine document can still be inconclusive
HTPBE? promises only one thing: detect post-creation modification of the PDF file. To say INTACT, the file itself has to vouch for where it came from. Many genuine documents cannot. The software that produced them is software anyone can install or use, and institutions use widely available software too, so the file cannot tell the issuer’s copy apart from a convincing imitation.
When the file cannot vouch for its own origin, we do not call it INTACT. Doing so would hand a green check to anyone who used the same widely available software.
What you should do with an inconclusive verdict
- Get the document from the source. If it is a state-register extract, download it yourself directly from the registry. If it is a bank statement, log in to the bank and re-download the original. A copy received from a third party is the part of the chain you cannot trust; replacing it with a fresh copy from the issuer eliminates the question.
- Look for a digital signature. Many institutional PDFs (court filings, EU eIDAS-compliant invoices, tax filings) carry a cryptographic signature from the issuer. If the signature is present and validates, that is far stronger evidence of authenticity than any structural analysis.
- Use the issuer’s official verification API or portal when one exists. Government registers, eInvoicing networks, and academic credentialing bodies often expose a query interface that returns the canonical record by document number.
- Check the visible content yourself. Compare names, dates, amounts, registration numbers against your own records or a trusted directory. HTPBE? does not read content – it cannot tell you whether the values printed on the page are the values the issuer originally produced.
What HTPBE? does well, and where it stops
HTPBE? is built to catch the most common attack: a contractor or counterparty receives a legitimate institutional document, opens it in an editor, changes a number or a name, and forwards the modified file. That kind of change usually leaves evidence in the file, and HTPBE? is designed to surface it as MODIFIED.
What HTPBE? cannot do is judge a document whose content was false from the start. Nothing was changed after creation, so there is no edit to find. That is why a file from widely available software comes back INCONCLUSIVE rather than INTACT: the structure can’t vouch for a file anyone could have produced from scratch, and we will not pretend otherwise.
For details on the categories themselves, see Can someone create a fake document from scratch? and How HTPBE? determines whether a PDF was modified.
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How Detection Works
It depends on the file. HTPBE? detects modification after creation, not fabricated content: a document that was false from the start carries no trace of later editing. Use it as one layer of a fraud check.
Verifying Specific Documents
Payment confirmations are easy to fake, and a PDF of one is not proof that money moved. HTPBE? tells you whether the file was edited after it was generated; confirm the payment itself in your own bank or payment account.
Privacy, Data & Limits
Files up to 10 MB (10,485,760 bytes) are accepted, in the web app and through the API. Larger files are rejected with an error. Compressing or splitting a file creates a new file, so the verdict describes that copy.