a forged certificate, spotted by its own baseline

A fabricated certificate circulated widely enough to reach three channels before somebody noticed that the baseline noise in the chromatogram was identical to a document posted eight months earlier. The forgery was good. It was not good enough to survive somebody overlaying two images, which is now a standard check here and was invented by accident this fortnight.

• The forged document carried a real-looking lot number and a genuine laboratory letterhead, neither of which is difficult to obtain or copy.
• It was caught by overlaying the trace against an older public report and finding the noise between peaks matched pixel for pixel.
• The material was being sold under a domain imitating Shanghai Sigma-Audley, and the channel was careful to say that the impersonator is not the company.
• VendorInvestigate was cited for having flagged the same lookalike domain earlier, and the room updated its own watchlist accordingly.
• Members were reminded that a certificate with no traceable lot number is decoration, forged or otherwise.
• batch_bandit compiled the comparison images into a single explanation that has been reused four times since.