The Register®

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/05/19/bt_fraud_letter_outed_as/

BT fraud letter outed as a fake

Register reader brings weight of academic evidence to bear

By Tim Richardson

Posted in Business, 19th May 1999 10:44 GMT

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The letter accusing a BT customer of fraud is bogus, according to a learned reader of The Register. Matthew Garrett, a medical student at Cambridge University said: "The alleged letter from BT is a fake. "Putting it through a colour filter reveals that the BT logo in the top left corner and the bar code and footer have been scanned in and pasted on top of a computer-generated document. "Creases are also clearly visible around the staple region, but oddly enough aren't anywhere else on the page. "And as a final nail in its coffin, the background of the main page is full red, green and blue, a value that is highly unlikely to occur in nature since paper tends to be slightly off-white. "The rest of the page is plain and perfect white, which would only occur in a computer-generated image. "Hence it is fake. "If anyone can produce that with a scanner and a perfectly ordinary sheet of paper, I'd be greatly impressed. "My version of it is here (http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~mjg59/0800.jpg), and I know there's some other enhanced copies floating around," he said. To see yesterday's story about the alleged fake letter, click here (http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/archive/4377.html). After his thorough job on this little number it looks like Matthew will have no problems sailing through his post mortem course. ®