A method of checking a sheet as to forgery thereof, the sheet being
provided with an electronic circuit chip from or in which information can
be read out or written and having visible information. The method
includes a step of encrypting the visible information of the sheet and
storing the encrypted visible information in the electronic circuit chip,
and a step of determining discriminatively the authenticity of the sheet
by comparing the visible information of the sheet with the information
stored in the electronic circuit chip.