Electronic Signature Licitness for Affidavit of Identity in United States

How to eSign a document: electronic signature licitness for Affidavit of Identity in United States

[Music] hey everyone everyone everyone welcome back to my channel side hustle seattle hey everyone welcome back to my channel side hustle seattle now today is actually a video that was requested by somebody in the comments section so shout out to you for requesting it i definitely think it's an important one if you're looking to do remote online notary work like me so again if you're like me and you're doing remote online notary work or looking to get into it there's a few things that you need to know slash know how to get in order to do it so those things are electronic signature an electronic tutorial seal and a digital certificate so we'll go into what they are how do you use them how do you get one now i always say for anything that has to do with notary work loan sending agent work anything like that it's very important to check check with your state laws to make sure that you're doing everything correctly because states do vary so please do your due diligence to make sure that you're doing everything by the book before you just jump right into it but let's go in to the first one okay so the first one easily the most straightforward one is your electronic signature not to be confused with the disney digital signature because those are actually very different so electronic signature essentially it's just an electronic version of the wet signature that you typically put on a piece of paper of course if you're going to get sent a document over the web you need a way to be able to sign that document electronically now any ron platform that you're using is going to have a way to create your signature and affix it to a document so it's not something that the purchase it's not something you have to think much about most of the time you're given an option to either type your name in and pick from a different selection of like signature variances whatever one gets closer to your actual signature or you can like hand draw it into the program itself most of the time you can use like your mouse pad to try to draw it or you can use like a physical mouse or a stylus to try to draw out your signature to get it as close as possible or a third option is just to upload a picture of your written signature so that way it's exact so again extremely straightforward your platform will provide you a way to get your electronic signature and of course once you actually need to sign a document it'll just be readily available on the side and you can just drag and drop your signature into the field and place needed to fix it okay so next let's talk about the electronic tutorial seal so it's very important when you're searching for it or like doing a google search to actually add the notorious part because if you just just do electronic seal it's not going to give you the search results that you think it will but essentially it is just an electronic version of the wet ink seal that you put on your documents when you're notarizing them so it's going to serve the same general purpose right it's going to tell you the notaries name the state their commission and their commission number the expiration date now it can take many forms and it varies by state by state but for the most part it's going to look almost exactly like the wet stamp that you have once it's actually affixed to the document and if you were to get one through a third party most the time is given to you in the form of an image file so a jpeg a pdf a peg file okay so when it comes to your electronic tutorial seal it's actually important to know which rom platform you plan to use because some of them do give it for free as part of being on the platform so i know pavaso verify notarize live notary and notary live all give it for free when you're using their platform and so there's no need to go out and purchase one but if you did want to purchase one you can either go through the n a i want to say it's twenty dollars you just give them your commission information they generate the electronic seal and they'll send it to you via image file or if you're in a state like washington where the seal is extremely basic and straightforward it's literally just a box with some information in it you can either make it yourself if you're good at that or you can do it the hack way i did which is to sign up for a free e-notary account on they will generate the seal for you and then you can just download it and use it for any service or any platform that you want to so i will go into how to sign up for the account and how to download it okay so like i said does allow you to sign up for a free e-notary profile and depending on your state it will auto-generate a sale for you it doesn't do it for all states but it does it for most states so all you do is you go to your profile there's going to be a little notary section you put in your commission information and it will generate a seal from there you can just right click it download it as a png and boom you have a seal you can use it for any platform that you want now my suggestion unless you're in a state that has a very intricate seal don't pay for it it's so easy to get it for free it doesn't seem that hard to make one either so i would say if you can get away with getting for free might as well and of course when it comes to actually using the seal pretty straightforward whatever platform that you're using once you've uploaded the seal or they've provided it for you you should be able to just drag and drop it into the document and fix it to wherever you need to actually put your notorious seal it should be fairly straightforward okay so let's get into the final part of the equation and that is digital certificates easily the most confusing part of the equation as well now i spent some time looking into them and i will say i'm still confused however i do generally know why they're important and how they work so contrary to the name a digital certificate is not an actual certificate it's not a piece of paper but think about it this way so when you are notarizing a document in person right you're putting your physical signature on it you put your ink snap on it it is pretty easy to figure out if that document has been tampered with right you can see if somebody's changed your signature you can see if they've adjusted dates you can see if they've adjusted the seal but when it comes to electronic documents it's not as easy to actually tell something's been tampered with right we know people who are very good at computers very good at manipulating stuff on the web and that is where the digital certificate comes into play so what is a digital certificate so i'm gonna try to keep it as basic as possible a digital certificate is a set of unique credentials that are bound to your identity so that way when you send a document over the web the person on the receiving end can verify that it came from the person who they think it should be coming from they can verify that you are who you say you are so it serves mainly two functions to verify identity and to make something tamper evident now i'll post somewhere right here an example of what it looks like when you sign something and you have a digital certificate but if you were to click on that signature you should be able to go in and it will say kind of right at the top that this document has not been touched since the signature has been put onto the document and you can look even further and you can look into the credentials to see who it was issued to who was issued by and if they're valid so that way if somebody went and tried to mess with that one it would tell you right in the beginning but then also if you look at the credentials and the credentials weren't from somebody who you thought it was supposed to be from you can tell that it has been tampered with don't worry about knowing all the intricacies of a digital certificate just know that it is for the safety and security of everyone involved in this document signing and when you sign something using a digital certificate it actually makes electronic the electronic signature uh legally binded okay so now that you generally know what a digital certificate is and how it works let's talk about how to get one so just like the electronic tutorial seal is very important to know which roan platform that you're going to use because some of them give it for free when you purchase their package some of them you have to buy it directly through them you cannot upload a party one and some of them require you to get one from a third party so i know synax and live notary actually provide you the seal itself when you purchase their package so you don't need to go and get one yourself and then i want to say pavaso and verify make you get the electronic or the digital certificate directly through them and it costs i want to say a hundred dollars on both of those platforms when you have to purchase it directly through them again you cannot upload one from a third party so don't go ahead and get one if you know those are the only platforms that you're going to use but most other platforms have you get it through the third party there's a couple ways to do it you can either get it through ident trust which is what it looks like most people use or you can go through the nna and purchase through them and they will give you a voucher to then put on ident trust to get your digital certificate so this is ident trust and what you'll see is a list of different platforms especially ron platforms that you can select from now selecting one doesn't mean that you can only use it on that platform it just helps you narrow down to make sure that you're getting the right certificate so i just click notarize for this case so what you want is the basic assurance unaffiliated and that should be good for any ron platform that allows you to upload a third party certificate and then you just go ahead and go next now the how long you're getting it for will determine the cost so you can do it for one year two years or three years of a valid certificate i went ahead and just did one year because i'm new don't want to necessarily lock myself in for two years now go ahead and it's just verifying that this is exactly what you want before you go by now now if you purchase through the nna they'll give you a voucher to put in here so that way you don't have to pay twice so that's where you would put the voucher in if you decided to purchase this one through the nna but if not go ahead and just go next okay perfect so you'll go ahead and just put your basic information just like filling out any application you'll notice that they asked you for your social security number remember this is tied to your identity almost like a unique fingerprint so you're going to want to put in your social security number you want to make sure it's password protected you want to make sure you have very strong security questions but go ahead and just fill out the application and submit it once you've gone through the whole process you filled out the application you submitted all your information it does take a few days for the actual certificate to get you so it's not something that's instantaneous and again that is because it is tied to your identity so it is a little bit more of all involved um than just like you know making your seal or something like that so just know once you've done it it will take a few days for you to receive it once you do receive it you want to export it onto your computer that way you can upload it to the different places or different platforms that you may need to now i will be honest there are definitely way better resources and videos out there that show you exactly how to download it exactly how to go step by step through the ident trust application so i'm just going to link to those resources because those people already did a great job explaining no need to replicate that information i know there's two youtube videos um in particular that i've watched like over and over again to get an understanding i will link those in the description and notarize actually has a really good document that shows you how to fill out that den trust application what to do once you get in how to download it to your computer and all of that so i'm also going to link that in the description now i am really hoping that i did not make you more confused about digital certificates and the whole process through this video hopefully it was straightforward if not i'm so sorry but take a look at the resources that i pinned in the description anyways as always thank you so much for watching and i will catch you in the next video