Why was my document flagged?
Understand what a high or medium fraud-risk rating means, why a flag is a signal and not a verdict and how to read the warnings on your result.
A flag is VerifyPDF pointing you to something worth a closer look. It is not a final judgment on the document or the person who sent it. This article explains what the ratings mean and how to read the warnings.
What the ratings mean
Every analysed document gets a fraud-risk rating based on a score from 0 to 100:
- High (score 0 to 40) means there are strong document-fraud signals.
- Medium (score 41 to 79) means there are some signals worth a manual look.
- Low (score 80 to 100) and Trusted mean the document looks clean.
A higher score is better. A high risk rating comes from a low score.
A flag is a signal, not a verdict
A high or medium rating is not a legal accusation. It tells you that VerifyPDF found signals you should review yourself. You stay in control of the decision.
Use the result as a starting point. Look at the document, check it against what you expected and ask the sender for clarification if you need to.
What warnings mean
Warnings are signals that something deserves attention. They can come from several broad areas:
- Document type and issuer patterns - whether the PDF behaves like documents usually produced by that kind of issuer.
- Template matching - whether the layout and structure match known examples from the same or similar sources, where VerifyPDF has enough reference data.
- Machine-learning signals - model output that highlights unusual patterns across the visible document and the PDF file structure, based on patterns from millions of documents VerifyPDF has processed since 2019.
- Content consistency - whether dates, totals, page structure and other details make sense together.
- File quality and origin signals - whether the file looks like an original PDF or like it passed through extra tools before upload.
The result shows customer-friendly warnings, strongest first, so you know what to review before relying on the document.
Why one flag is not the whole story
A single warning is a prompt to look closer, not a verdict. Genuine documents sometimes pick up a flag. For example, a bank statement saved through a third-party tool can carry unusual file-origin signals even when nothing was changed in bad faith.
That is why VerifyPDF gives you an overall trust score and a fraud-risk band on top of the individual warnings. Use them together:
- A clean band with one minor warning usually means the document is fine.
- Several strong warnings, or a medium or high band, mean you should investigate before you rely on the document.
False alarms can happen
VerifyPDF looks for signals, and some honest documents carry signals too. For example, a clean document that was re-saved or re-exported by certain tools can carry unusual file-origin signals even though nothing was changed in bad faith.
That is why the warnings matter. Read them, weigh them against the context and decide based on the whole picture, not the rating alone.
What to do next
- See where these flags appear in a result in read your verification result.
- If a result looks wrong or you are unsure, contact us at /contact/.