This is a story of the last 3 years and my personal & business struggle to make online notarization legal with SignNow. It includes death threats, cease and desist letters, and even our Hacker News thread being killed (I like to think it is too disruptive).
It all started about 3 years ago. I had just left West Point, then the Army, and was trying to figure out what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was something of a hacker in High School, and a tech geek, so I ended up helping companies set up their document management platforms. Technically the implementations were straightforward, but it allowed me to work firsthand with a variety of people managing contracts and contract signings on a daily basis.
One on my clients (I’ll leave their name out of this) ended up getting hit by notary fraud…badly. Of a $300M fund, they lost $5M in write offs due to fraudulent notarizations. These came in all shapes and sizes, but generally were because a party was trying to avoid having someone see a document.
I was stunned at the effect, and went out to dinner with a colleague and friend to talk it over. This was our spark of an idea: Notarization is really painful and it is really almost laughable as a fraud prevention tool today, but what if it were online? We knew we could leverage technology to more accurately identify people, record video of them signing, and use all of this to create a “near bulletproof” contract in a court of law. At least very accurately answer the question “Who signed this?”
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