Fake, recycled and mismatched COAs: how to spot all three

Most bad certificates are not forgeries. They are real documents doing the wrong job — reused across batches, or attached to material they never described. Each failure mode has its own tell.

Fake: the document that was never a report

Invented certificates tend to fail on boring details: a laboratory that cannot be found outside the document, report numbers that never change between products, purity figures that are suspiciously round or suspiciously identical across unrelated batches, and template artefacts — mismatched fonts, misaligned columns, a signature that is a pasted image. One tell is rarely proof; three together usually are.

Recycled: a real report, retired and reused

The most common failure by far. A genuine certificate from one batch keeps circulating long after that batch is gone. The paper is real; the correspondence is dead. The catch: compare the batch reference and the report date against what you actually received. A certificate dated long before the batch it supposedly covers, or one whose LOT no seller can connect to your delivery, is a recycled document.

Mismatched: right paper, wrong vial

Sometimes nobody intended to deceive — the wrong PDF simply gets attached. The result is identical: the paper describes material you do not have. This is why the LOT match is the first check in reading a COA, and why a community-published laboratory test once found a vial containing an entirely different substance than its label named while the paperwork looked fine. Only an identity analysis settles that question.

The habit that beats all three

Ask for the certificate BEFORE deciding, match the batch reference character for character, check the report carries an identity analysis and not purity alone, and keep the document with a date. Four steps, under two minutes, and every failure mode above becomes visible.

All guides →