Suspicious Files

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I have a disgruntled ex-partner who has been extorting me the past couple of years in an attempt to regain an asset.  This person has a personality trait which tends to cause them to accuse me of actions they are actually guilty of.

This person has admitted to accessing files, swapping files, etc. and much of the extortion actions have proven that they have had access at least some of the time, though I've stepped up security.

One persistant accusation involves their referring to Adobe accounts, swapping documents in their system/emails, etc.

This person has most recently been accusing me of having forged the original agreements which are the root of our issues. I'd been brushing the accusations aside, knowing that the original inked documents are in a secure location, but we've been notified of their intent to formally accuse me again and have hired new counsel to pursue the false charges.

I've become accustom to reviewing document properties but have little expertise in these matters.

I've recently suspected that a certain PDF document has been replaced in my system, something this person has been accusing me of for quite awhile.

Today I opened one of the PDF's related to this issue to review before discussing issues related to this one with a lawyer.  I thought something might be off and so I quickly reviewed the Document Properties.

Under Advanced Document Properties it states "PDF Producer:  contentCrawler"

Under Custom Document Properties it indicates there is a Custom Property named: CreationDate--Text

I am using Adobe Acrobat DC. I created the original scan of this document using either Acrobat DC and/or the built-in functionality of an HP OfficeJet in my home office.  I have never added custom properties to a pdf, nor had need to do so. 

If I assume this persons accusations are admissions, they have been at least trying to replace all of this specific set of documents to reflect one which has been modified to appear forged.  This person has already attempted to frame me for extorting myself with my own photos and all sorts of accusations to government agencies.

Can anyone tell me if there is a simple explanation for the document properties described above. Is it possible that they've used some sort of "contentCrawler" to find/replace my pdf's with one modified to appear as if it was created on the date/time of my original scan?

Any help much appreciated. Thank you

[try67]

That's a very unfortunate situation. I hope you changed all of your passwords (including to the Adobe cloud!), to prevent this person from gaining access to it. If you hadn't, there's a good chance they tempered with it...

However, "contentCrawler" seems to be the name of an OCR engine (https://www.litera.com/products/legal/contentcrawler/), which makes sense if you said you scanned the documents. Maybe your scanner uses this software to identify the text in the scanned image and convert it into "real" text. This by itself does not mean it was tempered with.

But if you had an Agreement via the Adobe Document Cloud there must be a change-log maintained by the cloud itself that can't be manipulated by either side. That's the entire point of such a mechanism, I would think.