Recently, I had to send in a number of forms via a PostIdent procedure in Germany. You have to sign an additional form and be present with your papers for verification in the Post Office.
There was a problem later on in the process - The signature I gave at the Post Office (produced in a crowded situation, under stress) did not match the one on the forms (6 pages, all individually signed in the comfort of my home). As a result, I was asked to re-send the 6 pages and have them match with my initial PostIdent signature. Not redo the process so all match - reproduce the PostIdent signature six times.
As this was in dealing with an online service, I could see exactly what those pages and their signatures looked like in my account and indeed, the PostIdent signature looked a lot different. It looked: impossible to reproduce.
Cutting the story short: I found myself having to fake my own signature 6 times. I tried for about half an hour to reproduce my meaningless squiggles. I ended up taking a completely different route than using this service - not solely based on this problem, but hugely influenced by it.
That is to say: Yes, signatures truly are a ridiculous form of verification.
Yes, but as ridiculous as they are, they're still good for some uses.
E.g., if you follow the "fraud-closure" robo-signing story, you know that the banks and mortgage agencies are all guilty of perjury. In some cases, there are 20 distinct signatures supposedly by the same company officer, at least 5 of which were supposedly signed on any given day.
Not that the government or attorney general wants to actually prosecute and I doubt anything will come out of this. But if there was no "wet signature" (handwritten ink signature on the original document) requirement, there would likely be no evidence of wrongdoing, especially after the mass deletion of emails and shredding of printed documents that the mortgage industry practiced.
