I looked at the Virginia enotary application. You have to have an X.509 digital certificate that can be verified with a certificate authority to even submit the application. Some platforms, like docVerify, don't give you the certificate. Instead you use a secure website and they apply the digital signature on your behalf. (Virginia doesn't approve platform providers, so they don't express any opinion about whether this arrangement is legal or not.)
So if you wanted to use docVerify, you would have to pay TWO fees to vendors. There would be $100 to docVerify to register as an eNotary with them (plus subscription fees in some situations), and around $100 to get an X.509 digital certificate (which expires after a year or two).
In this post, "digital certificate" is a file from a certificate authority that says, essentially, that a long number, the secret key, belongs to a person with a certain name. It is used by software like Adobe Reader or Microsoft Word while creating digital signatures.
A digital signature is a long number that links the text of the document to the public key of the signer, showing that the signer signed the text. It doesn't have to look like a handwritten signature; it doesn't even have to contained the typed name of the signer. |
