- AI imaging can create almost anything, including fake receipts
- Fake receipts generated by expense reports are costing employers
- Experts warn this could be just the beginning of the problem
Unsurprisingly, the growing popularity of image, video and document generation tools is ushering in a new era of fraud for businesses and consumers alike.
New research has claimed that businesses are seeing an increase in fake expense receipts generated by AI, which are proving incredibly difficult to detect. Expense software platform AppZen noted that these AI-generated expenses now account for 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September 2025.
This may not seem like much, but it is an increase from 0% in 2024.
Don’t trust your eyes
The findings are supported by financial technology company Ramp, which claims to have detected more than $1 million worth of fraudulent invoices in the past 90 days.
There have been enough expense scandals to know that fake expenses are not unheard of, but AI is making them much more convincing, creating a lot of extra work for companies to verify them.
Receipts are not complicated documents, so forging them does not require any particular skills, especially with the help of AI. So much so that human reviewers often cannot distinguish between AI-generated receipts and real ones.
“These receipts have gotten so good that we tell our customers, ‘Don’t trust your eyes,'” said Chris Juneau, senior vice president and head of product marketing at SAP Concur.
This represents, of course, an additional expense for companies. Your company may soon need to implement software that scans the submitted receipt metadata, although even this can be removed, so there is no clear solution here.
Currently, AI is entering almost all areas of Western life and complicating the functions of supervisors around the world. Since millions of students even use AI to write their papers, which in some cases is undetectable by software, this has created an impossible task for teachers and schools. – highlighting how widespread this problem has become.
As AI becomes increasingly difficult to detect, driving a new era of fraud across industries, it’s hard to imagine a solution that doesn’t involve most of the world returning to pen and paper or physical media just to prove authenticity.
Through: Financial times
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