Section 465

Forgery -- making a false document and passing it off as real -- undermines the trust that people, businesses, and courts place in written records. Section 465 is the baseline punishment for forgery in general; more serious versions of forgery (involving courts, wills, or valuable securities) are punished more heavily under the sections that follow it. The IPC was repealed on 1 July 2024 and replaced by the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, which now governs these offences.

In Md. Ibrahim v. State of Bihar (2009), the Supreme Court explained that not every dishonest act involving a document is "forgery" in the technical sense used by this chapter of the IPC. Forgery requires the actual making of a false document (as defined in the forgery provisions) with the necessary dishonest or fraudulent intention -- merely executing or registering a document while falsely claiming ownership of the property, for example, is not automatically forgery unless the document itself is fabricated or falsified. Courts use this distinction to separate genuine forgery cases from disputes that are really about fraud or title, which are dealt with under other provisions.

• Myth: Forgery only means signing someone else's name.
  Fact: Forgery covers any dishonest making or altering of a document -- changing dates, amounts, or content counts too, not just fake signatures.