Aircraft maintenance is done according to airborne time.
Pilot logbooks are written up according to brakes off to brakes on (that's when you are the "captain").
So the two will rarely line up. With the average GA flight of say 1hr, you are looking at a 20% or so difference straight away.
The incentives to forge are opposite: the incentive to forge aircraft logbooks is downwards, and the incentive to forge pilot logbooks is upwards
A total Walter Mitty will be flying 1000hrs/year in a plane whose logbooks show 50hrs/year
Normally, nobody checks the logbooks for authenticity - stuff is necessarily done on trust. You can see the # of hours a G-reg has declared at the last Annual on the G-INFO public database. Checks are sometimes done if there is an accident.