AI-generated fake receipts: The latest finance fraud challenge
Websites dedicated to creating fake receipts have been a problem for years. Now, expense auditors face an escalating challenge: detecting increasingly sophisticated AI forgeries. Generative AI has turned deceiving reimbursement systems into a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game.
As seen across social media and verified by multiple tech journalists, AI-generated receipts can be highly convincing—some even include details like food stains and crinkled paper to enhance authenticity. Telltale errors can be easily fixed, creating legitimate concerns among finance teams about how AI might be contributing to expense fraud. Manual reviews and basic duplicate checks are no match for AI-generated receipts, altered invoices, and cleverly reused documents.
A multi-layered approach to finding sophisticated receipt forgeries
Only AppZen is adapting to catch these scams, thanks to our multi-layered AI models and years of refining fraud detection. General-purpose AI platforms like ChatGPT struggle to distinguish between genuine and fake receipts. Our models, on the other hand, are engineered to excel at tasks like these. For example, we can detect receipts that have had their details modified and have been resubmitted multiple times by the same employee in an attempt to circumvent traditional duplicate checks.
These new capabilities are still evolving and improving. We’ve built trust with our global enterprise customers and work closely with them to find hundreds of thousands of such images across some of the world’s largest companies. AppZen has the largest content reserve of receipts, both real and fake, that have been subjected to forensic testing, and with which our AI has been trained. This vast dataset has been instrumental in training our specialized AI models to detect even the most sophisticated forgeries.
A comprehensive approach to eliminating AI-generated fake receipts
The reality of expense reporting is nuanced. Sometimes a fake receipt represents deliberate fraud, while in other cases, an employee might simply be trying to recreate a legitimately lost receipt. This is why we’ve developed a comprehensive approach. Rather than relying on a single detection method, our specialized models work together.
AI-generated receipts are getting better every day–but so is our AI. Its models have been trained on millions of receipts to recognize both legitimate and fake images. They work together like a layered defense system, because we know there’s no single, foolproof way to detect the latest AI-generated fakes.
Kunal Verma, PhD in Computer Science, CTO and co-founder at AppZen
Evolving to meet the AI-generated receipt challenge
We’ve been in the AI game for over a decade and, during that time, we developed a number of effective fraud detection techniques. Our anomaly detection models identify unusual patterns. Our data signature models look for document authenticity. Our mathematical validation confirms there’s numerical consistency, and our missing information models can spot any telltale omissions.
We’re also developing several new approaches to address the latest fake receipt technologies. If an AI-generated image contains metadata, for example, our AI will catch it. Image generators, which tend to be error-prone when creating images with a lot of detail, present additional red flags, such as amounts that don’t correctly add up or odd expense items. Our AI analyzes millions of global receipts, comparing each transaction against our database of legitimate receipts from the same merchant to quickly identify suspicious variations.
Fighting AI with AI
In a recent LinkedIn article, Kunal Verma, AppZen’s CTO, stated, “The irony isn’t lost on me that we’re using AI to catch AI-generated fraud. This is exactly why we built AppZen’s technology from the ground up, specifically for finance use cases. Our models have been fine-tuned on a decade of financial document forensics. We’re not just reacting to this new wave of AI forgeries—we’ve been preparing for it since our founding by focusing on subtle patterns that even the most advanced, general-purpose AI models struggle to replicate.”
Other expense providers might not be able to surface the fraudulent and out-of-policy transactions lurking in their employees’ expense reports, but AppZen is uniquely positioned to address this new threat. Our AI is specifically trained to handle the tasks finance teams need most. Our solutions cross-reference receipts, purchase data, and historical patterns, using AI that learns from every transaction–and every attempted imposter–to ensure auditors aren’t outmatched in the fight against expense fraud.
Want to know how AI can combat the fraudulent transactions lurking in your expenses? Explore our Mastermind applications.
