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Countless business owners now use artificial intelligence tools to automate work tasks, boost productivity, and lower their costs. But some employees are also finding ways to use chatbots to enrich themselves on their employer’s dime, as more workers are turning in business expense reports padded with fake receipts created by online AI apps.
Multiplying media reports and social-platform posts note the increased use of phony AI-generated restaurant, hotel, and transportation bills by less than upright employees, who ask their companies to reimburse those fictive outlays as work expenses. This small-scale fraud often depends on easily accessible, and often free, online chatbots that no employer would ever want used for low-level grifting. But whether they’ve been tipped off to the practice by online messages or discovered it themselves through experimentation, a growing number of people have learned that platforms like ChatGPT can quickly serve up a bogus lunch chit to foist on an unsuspecting boss for repayment.
It’s still not clear how many businesses are being swindled by this relatively recent scam—or how much those scams costing employers. Remote payments news site Pymnts recently released a study finding “68 percent of organizations encountered at least one fraud attempt” through their accounts payable services, including fake employee receipt submissions.
This form of grifting isn’t new. For decades, some incorrigible employees have used applications like Photoshop to doctor receipts collected by other people to appear as their own business expenses, and other pre-AI software lets people create faux invoices from scratch.
But the flow of authentic-looking and hard to detect AI fakes may increase soon. Word continues to spread rapidly about how authentic looking chatbot-created forgeries look—and how difficult it is for employers to spot them before reimbursing funds employees never spent.
“You can use [ChatGPT] 4o to generate fake receipts,” noted tech sector employee Deedy in a March post on X. “There are too many real world verification flows that rely on ‘real images’ as proof. That era is over.”
Just how easy is it to create a sham proof of payment slip?
One AI novice reporter—who started in print media back when publications still used telexes as communications tech—managed to create a passable first attempt fake receipt in under a minute. Gaining access to a more powerful version of the same free chatbot—and refining the input prompt to specify restaurant location, and the last numbers of a real credit card to be used in the sham bill—would have likely resulted in an entirely convincing forgery. The initial results are already impressive:
That ease and effectiveness of using AI to make bogus receipts is already causing some employers to revert to old-school accounting methods to confound digital expense frauds.
“Lock it up, and get out,” said BB_Fin on a Reddit thread titled “ChatGPT now allows the creation of photorealistic fake receipts” earlier this year. “We’re going to a full paper based system again. The future is the past.”
But there are more modern ways to battle the problem for employers willing to pay for them.
Tech companies including Expensify, SAP Concur, and AppZen already have or are developing tools to spot AI-generated fake receipts. Those apps aim to rectify one of the biggest flaws that allows forgeries to sneak through: Automated AI platforms used to vet submitted employee expense accounts are often unable to identify the fraudulent bills created by the same or a similar app.
In response, new products are siccing multiple AI agents on submitted digital receipts to catch telltale tip-offs in fakes. Those include the metadata fingerprints that bots are programmed to leave on images they generate, mathematical errors chatbots can make on fake chits, and their occasional hallucination that puts incompatible items like dry cleaning or taxi charges on a restaurant bill.
“[O]ur Mastermind AI models work together, creating a platform of checks and balances,” wrote AppZen co-founder and CTO Kunal Verna on LinkedIn last April. “Where one model might miss a forgery, another catches it. This layered defense system is crucial because there’s no single ‘silver bullet’ for detecting the latest AI-generated fakes.”
Social-media users report that continued development of widely used AI assistants like Copilot are also starting to flag fake receipts they’ve been asked to analyze.
“Copilot: The receipt appears to be fake,” noted imnotokayandthatso-k in the same Reddit threat on forged receipts. “The listed items and prices are unusual and do not match the typical offerings and prices at Texas Roadhouse…. These items are not found on the official Texas Roadhouse menu. The prices are also extremely high compared to the usual prices for dishes at Texas Roadhouse.”
For that reason, people claiming to be practitioners of pre-AI receipt forgeries say they’ll stick with software and hard-copy printouts of fake receipts they create by themselves.
“Receipt printer from AliExpress: $20,” redditor DutchTinCan said in the Reddit thread. “Photoshop license: $89. Unlimited expense receipts: Priceless.”
Except that’s not so for their employer, who’s shelling out money to reimburse those phony expenses.
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Bruce Crumley
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