How can HelloSign claim unauthenticated electronic signature process is legally valid? (US)
<p><a href="http://www.hellotech.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">HelloTech</a> has a series of documents they want potential technicians to sign. These are delivered by an email containing a link to their documents in the <a href="http://www.hellosign.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">HelloSign</a> document-signing service. Clicking this link sends the potential technician to a document they can sign, but there is no authentication step to verify that the person that's signing the document is who they say they are.</p>

<p>Since anyone could intercept the unauthenticated email link in transit and impersonate the signer, how can HelloSign claim that such a signature is legally valid?</p>

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<p>anyone could intercept the unauthenticated email link in transit and impersonate the signer</p>
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<p><strong>So?</strong></p>
<p>If they sent a paper copy, anyone could intercept it in transit and impersonate the signer. In both cases, this would be fraud and to quote from my answer to <a href="https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/1899/how-to-prove-the-genuinity-nongenuinity-of-a-signature/1900#1900">How to prove the genuinity/nongenuinity of a signature?</a></p>
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<p>Fraud would have to be proved: it would not be sufficient to say &quot;I did not sign that&quot;; the person would need to demonstrate that a fraud has been perpetrated.</p>
<p>A party to a contract is entitled to rely <em>prima facie</em> on the validity of the signature. A person would have to provide evidence that it was not their signature or had been affixed without their knowledge or consent.</p>
<p>A court would look at the entire circumstances surrounding such a claim; if a person had, up until the dispute, acted as though they had signed the document then a court would probably not countenance an argument that they hadn't.</p>
<p>It is always possible to construct contrived circumstances where this or that could happen but, in reality, they are extremely rare. Unless you are dealing with a con-artist, you can trust the signature; if you are dealing with a con-artist, you have bigger problems.</p>
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<p>It is irrelevant whether the signature is in ink or in bits, the same principles apply.</p>
<p>Of course, it is entirely possible, even likely, that the link sends a lot more information back to the HelloSign service than you think it does. Information that can both validate signatures and be stored as evidence.</p>

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