Something odd happening with text being removed from PDF's

Soldato
Joined
7 Dec 2002
Posts
4,011
Location
UK
I work in sales for a merchant account provider (card terminals basically) and we've had an application come in along with the required supporting documents such as a scan of the applicant driving licence, bank statement & utility bill as a PDF.

However upon checking the documents if I try to copy the contents over from Adobe Acrobat reader & paste them into anything else like MS Paint, Outlook or Word then elements of the document get removed including all text, I'm wondering if there could be any reason behind this that is genuine such as something redacting text due to how the documents were created or something to do with the scanner software doing something to the text in an attempt to make it clearer?

Or am I looking at some kind of multi layered PDF where he's added text into a fake image of a licence?

The driving licence for example is blank, the only thing left when I copy it is the photo & the blue EU flag on the pink background and what looks like some smudging where the text & Union Jack were. Same with the Barclays Statement, it just turns into a blank piece of paper with just the Barclays logo & two hole punch marks.

Could there be any genuine explanation for this?
 
Have you tried opening it with a different viewer?

Sumatra PDF for example which is also free.

Yes, it opens fine in a PDF viewer like Sumatra. What I need to know is why do other programs open it with no text.

In Sumatra for example I have a somewhat pixelated scan of a driving licence. If I copy it to paint there is no text, only the pink background and photo of the face.
 

That's a decent read thank you. Having to examine everything in detail at the moment as we are getting so many fraudulent application attempts.
 
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