Focus on the BIG picture.
Tuesday, Oct 28, 2025
Outside the box.
AI-Made Receipts Drive a New Wave of Expense Fraud as Firms Warn: 'Do Not Trust Your Eyes'
Finance teams report a sharp rise in falsified receipts generated by consumer AI tools, pushing companies to deploy their own machine checks
A growing number of companies say employees are using mainstream artificial-intelligence tools to generate realistic fake receipts and invoices, fuelling a rapid rise in expense fraud and forcing finance teams to rethink verification.
The new fakes reproduce paper textures, itemised menus and signatures so convincingly that leading expense platforms are warning customers not to rely on visual inspection alone.
“Do not trust your eyes,” one senior executive at a major travel-and-expense provider advised, underscoring how simple text prompts can now produce documents that once required specialist photo-editing skills.
Fresh data points to the acceleration.
One large expense-auditing platform reported that in September, roughly fourteen per cent of fraudulent submissions it flagged were AI-generated, while surveys of finance professionals in the United States and United Kingdom indicate about thirty per cent have seen an uptick in falsified receipts since the latest generation of image tools launched.
Separate polling suggests well over half of chief financial officers now suspect AI misuse in travel and expense claims.
Vendors are responding with their own automated defences.
Leading systems say they run tens of millions of monthly compliance checks using machine analysis of image integrity, metadata, cross-merchant matching and itinerary-to-receipt consistency, although simple screenshotting can strip tell-tale markers and complicate detection.
Independent security and risk briefings recommend layered controls and contextual checks rather than human review alone, reflecting how the barrier to entry for document forgeries has collapsed.
The trend forms part of a broader surge in AI-enabled fraud reported across sectors this year, including the use of deepfakes and synthetic identities.
Analysts note that while the most publicised cases involve impersonation scams, first-party fraud such as falsified expenses is spreading because it is low-risk for perpetrators and inexpensive to attempt at scale.
As companies tighten policies, invest in automated screening and educate staff, the near-term outlook is a defensive race between generative tools that produce convincing paperwork and verification engines designed to spot what the eye can no longer reliably see.
The new fakes reproduce paper textures, itemised menus and signatures so convincingly that leading expense platforms are warning customers not to rely on visual inspection alone.
“Do not trust your eyes,” one senior executive at a major travel-and-expense provider advised, underscoring how simple text prompts can now produce documents that once required specialist photo-editing skills.
Fresh data points to the acceleration.
One large expense-auditing platform reported that in September, roughly fourteen per cent of fraudulent submissions it flagged were AI-generated, while surveys of finance professionals in the United States and United Kingdom indicate about thirty per cent have seen an uptick in falsified receipts since the latest generation of image tools launched.
Separate polling suggests well over half of chief financial officers now suspect AI misuse in travel and expense claims.
Vendors are responding with their own automated defences.
Leading systems say they run tens of millions of monthly compliance checks using machine analysis of image integrity, metadata, cross-merchant matching and itinerary-to-receipt consistency, although simple screenshotting can strip tell-tale markers and complicate detection.
Independent security and risk briefings recommend layered controls and contextual checks rather than human review alone, reflecting how the barrier to entry for document forgeries has collapsed.
The trend forms part of a broader surge in AI-enabled fraud reported across sectors this year, including the use of deepfakes and synthetic identities.
Analysts note that while the most publicised cases involve impersonation scams, first-party fraud such as falsified expenses is spreading because it is low-risk for perpetrators and inexpensive to attempt at scale.
As companies tighten policies, invest in automated screening and educate staff, the near-term outlook is a defensive race between generative tools that produce convincing paperwork and verification engines designed to spot what the eye can no longer reliably see.
