Someone Says You Signed It. You Didn’t.
It usually starts with a bill, a collections letter, or a contract attached to a lawsuit. The other side says you agreed to pay, to guarantee a loan, or to renew a service. At the end of the document sits your signature. You know you never signed it. The question you bring to a lawyer is the obvious one: if my name is on it, am I stuck with it?
No. A signature on a screen is a claim, not a conclusion. But you have to fight it with evidence, and the evidence is often sitting in plain sight.
Start with the signature itself
Many disputed documents were never signed on any platform at all. Someone took an image of your signature from an old contract, a check, or a signed form, and pasted it into a new document. A pasted image often carries tells you can spot without an expert.
First, zoom in. A signature lifted from a lower resolution source pixelates when enlarged, so the curves break into visible blocks while the printed text around it stays crisp. Second, look at the background. A pasted image frequently arrives as a solid block with an opaque background, so you can see the edges of a rectangle sitting on top of the document, sometimes covering part of a signature line or a printed word. Third, compare documents. If the identical signature image, stroke for stroke and pixel for pixel, appears on two different documents, one of them is a copy. Real signatures do not repeat that way. Research confirms it: the same person's signature varies from one signing to the next, because variation in speed, pressure, and angle is built into the act of signing. Exact duplication is the fingerprint of a copy and paste job, not of a hand.
Then ask for the paper trail the platform keeps
If the document did go through a platform such as DocuSign, the fight moves to records the platform generates automatically. DocuSign gives every envelope a Certificate of Completion, available to all participants in the agreement. Ask for it before you argue about anything else.
The certificate lists the envelope ID, the sender, and the number of pages, signatures, and initials. For each signer it records the signature image, the signer's IP address, and key event timestamps. Its summary events form an audit trail, with timestamps for events such as the envelope being sent and completed. The envelope History gives the fuller list of sender and recipient activity. Together these records answer the questions that decide these cases. What email address received the signing link? What IP address opened and signed, and when? Does that location match anywhere you were? One caution from DocuSign's own documentation: the IP address may belong to an internet provider, a VPN, or a cell tower, so it gives a general picture of the connection, not an exact address.
The certificate also shows how the signer was authenticated, and this is where many claims get thin. DocuSign lets the sender require an access code, an SMS or phone code, knowledge based questions, or ID verification. If none of that was used, access rested on the email link alone, and anyone who controlled that inbox, or got the link forwarded to them, could have signed in your name.
What the law actually asks
The federal ESIGN Act, at 15 U.S.C. 7001, says a signature may not be denied legal effect solely because it is electronic. Read that carefully. It protects the format. It does not say the signature is yours. The Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, adopted in most states, puts the real test in Section 9: an electronic signature is attributable to a person only if it was the act of that person, and that act may be shown in any manner, including how effective the security procedure was. In plain terms, attribution is a factual fight about who actually did the signing, and the side trying to enforce the contract has to prove the signature was your act. A weak audit trail, an IP address in a place you have never been, and a signature image that matches another document exactly are all evidence on your side of that fight.
What to do this week
Two moves matter most. First, say it in writing, promptly: you did not sign, you dispute the signature, and you want the complete Certificate of Completion and envelope history preserved. Silence lets the other side treat the document as accepted. Second, preserve your own records before they age out: your emails from that period, your calendar, anything showing where you were and what devices you used at the recorded signing time. Do not sign anything new with that party, and do not pay on the document just to make the calls stop. Both can be used to argue you accepted it after all.
Gabriel Vincent Tese is an attorney with Spector Gadon Rosen Vinci P.C. in Philadelphia focused on cyber litigation and technology law. He can be reached at gtese@sgrvlaw.com.
This post is general information, not legal advice. For advice about your specific situation, consult an attorney.