Defects in UV-vis-NIR reflectance spectra as method for forgery detections in writing documents

Documents have taken up a very important place in our society. Frauds committed in connection with documents are not at all uncommon, and, in fact, represent a very large domain of the forensic science called “questioned documents”. In the field of forensic examination of questioned documents, the legitimacy of an ink entry is often an essential question. A common type of forgery consists in materially altering an existing writing or adding a new writing. These changes can be characterized by means of optical spectroscopy. The aim of this work is to perform the UV-vis-NIR reflectance spectrophotometry to analyze a range of blue and black commercial ballpoint pens, in order to investigate the discriminating abilities of the different inks found on the same document.