What does international political corruption have to do with type design? Normally, nothing—but that’s little consolation for the former prime minister of Pakistan. When Nawaz Sharif and his family came under scrutiny earlier this year thanks to revelations in the Panama Papers, the smoking gun in the case was a font. The prime minister’s daughter, Maryam Sharif, provided an exculpatory document that had been typeset in Calibri—a Microsoft font that was only released for general distribution nearly a year after the document had allegedly been signed and dated.

Glenn Fleishman is a freelance writer and editor, podcast host, recovering typesetter, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

A “Fontgate” raged. While Sharif’s supporters waged a Wikipedia war over the Calibri entry, type designer Thomas Phinney quietly dropped some history lessons about the typeface on Quora, and found himself caught in a maelstrom of global reporting. Phinney said that because Calibri has been in use for several years, people have forgotten that it’s a relatively new font. This has made Calibri a hot topic in document forgery as fakers fail to realize that this default Microsoft Word typeface will give itself away.

This wasn’t Phinney's first forgery rodeo. He calls himself a font detective—an expert called upon in lawsuits and criminal cases to help determine documents’ authenticity based on forensic analysis of letterforms used, and sometimes the ways in which they appear on paper. Phinney even IDs each of his cases with a Sherlock-Holmesian title: The Dastardly Divorce, The Quarterback Conundrum, and The Presidential Plot.

Detecting fraud via fonts isn’t as sexy as sleuthing art forgery; it often involves tedious measurements with digital calipers, examinations under loupes and microscopes, charts that track the slight differences between two versions of the Times Roman face, or evidence that a particular form of office printer didn’t exist at the document’s dated execution.

Even so, such measurements can be worth millions—and can even be lucrative, for the handful of experts (maybe a dozen) who have hung out a font-detective shingle. Phinney had an expert declaration filed last month as part of a lawsuit against Justin Timberlake, will.i.am, their labels, and others. The suit is about a sample used in Timberlake’s 2006 "Damn Girl," but the case might hinge on the size and clarity of the type on Timberlake’s CD cover. (How could that be? Read on.)

Phinney didn’t set out to be a font detective. For decades, he has largely focused on the intricate and exhaustive work of type design, a task that requires aesthetics, hand skills, and enormous patience to create the several hundred to thousands of distinct characters needed by modern users. He is also a natural storyteller, and speaks in a professorial style of infinitely bifurcating tales—one leads to another leads to another, all of them interesting. He was part of Adobe’s type design team in 1999 when a lawyer emailed looking for a font expert to help determine the validity of a will. “I was the only one who expressed an interest,” he says. In that case, in addition to font discrepancies, Phinney testified that a will dated in 1983 was printed by a high-resolution ink-jet printer, the Deskjet, which wasn’t a product until 1988.