[vidarh]

It's even worse now: A lot of places now accept PDF's of things like bank statements, since so many people don't get paper copies any more.

It's not that it was hard to fake before if you wanted to, but when you can just get a real PDF as a starting point, and edit it slightly it's just theatre.

[astrange]

It doesn't have to be perfect. This is how financial regulation works in the US too, but it does work. The idea is that every individual step is weak, but it's a crime to bypass any of it. So the deterrence is you can catch things probabilistically and most people don't want to commit a whole bunch of crimes at once because they all have individual punishments.