Incident: Fake receipts that read perfectly

Module 12 · Incident file · About 25 minutes

What happened

In October 2025 the Financial Times reported a surge in fake expense receipts made with AI image generators "from OpenAI and Google, among others", as Computerworld summarised it (Viktor Eriksson, "The latest genAI scam: fake expense receipts", 27 October 2025). The tools, it said, can create "extremely realistic fake receipts in just a few seconds without any specialized knowledge."

The numbers came from the companies that check expense claims. AppZen, an expense software provider, reported that AI-generated receipts "accounted for roughly 14% of all fraudulent documents submitted last month", and that "zero were submitted last year" (Daniella Genovese, Fox Business, 28 October 2025). Ramp's agents "flagged more than $1 million in fraudulent invoices in just 90 days." ICAEW, the accountancy body for England and Wales, placed the AppZen figure in September 2025 and passed on the FT's observation that "the launch of OpenAI's GPT-4o model last year coincided with a sharp rise in falsified receipts" (ICAEW Insights, "Expenses fraud: how to spot an AI-generated receipt", 13 November 2025).

The cost was money paid on documents that described events that never happened. Arun Chauhan of Tenet Law told ICAEW: "These fakes are now so realistic that they can be very difficult to detect." Computerworld reported that detection tools "analyze metadata, patterns in file names and other details", but that "even metadata can be deleted."