When It Comes to Spotting Fake Receipts, It’s A.I. vs. A.I.

The New York Times ^ | Sept. 6, 2025, 8:00 a.m. ET | Sarah Kessler

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Software companies that audit expense reports are adding a new arsenal of capabilities to try to detect receipts that have been created using A.I. chatbots.

It wasn’t long after ChatGPT began generating realistic images that Anant Kale started seeing posts on social media that explained how it could be used to generate a pretty convincing fake receipt.

That was, he recognized, his problem.

As the chief executive of AppZen, a software used by finance teams to manage expenses, he had overseen the creation of fraud-detection tools that flagged A.I.-generated receipts. But this was different.

“We were like, oh, shoot, this is too easy,” he told DealBook.

AppZen immediately started developing a tool to detect fake receipts generated by chatbots. It’s not the only one: The expense management app Expensify added ways to detect A.I.-generated receipts in April, and SAP Concur’s automated expense-auditing tool, Verify, expanded a similar capability to all users this month.

This summer, when announcing new efforts to flag A.I.-generated receipts, Nicolas Ritz, who works on product development at the corporate travel software company Navan, summed up the dilemma:

“A.I.-generated receipts will only get better from here,” he wrote. “To combat fraudulent A.I., we need to use A.I.”

Expense fraud can be a slippery slope.

Kale said it’s common for employees to generate their first fake receipt to account for a legitimate expense. Maybe they lost the receipt. But when they don’t get caught, they do it again. Occasionally, the fraud is egregious. AppZen once detected a batch of A.I.-generated receipts submitted by a company employee for hotels and airfare in Bangkok — a city that, upon further investigation, the employee had not visited.

The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, which certifies about 5,000 new examiners each year, regularly asks members to submit the largest case of occupational fraud they’ve investigated in the last 18 months. In...

[Dr. Sivana]

Anyone with a cursory knowledge of HTML code can do it. Or you take a real receipt, change it slightly in a paint program (by cutting and pasting digits in the original), add very light speckling, lower the resolution to about 200x200 (old FAX machine res.), then photo copy the output and scan it. On a $500 receipt, it is worth the effort.

[usurper]

Kale said it’s common for employees to generate their first fake receipt to account for a legitimate expense. Maybe they lost the receipt.

I traveled extensively for the US government. Anyone who pulled this BS deserves to be fired.

If you lost your receipt, whoever gave it to you still has a copy. Generating a fake receipt and summiting it is clear and simple fraud.

I don't care why you did it, you did it and now you are unemployed. Be happy your not being prosecuted for about 5 different felonies like wire fraud etc.

[Bikkuri]

[Raycpa]

interesting to see how the IRS will handle this