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Is that receipt real or fake? Protecting against AI-generated fraud
It has never been easier to forge documents. In a few seconds, fraudsters using generative AI can produce a “receipt” with genuine logos, detailed line items – even a timestamp.
For finance teams that still rely on manual reconciliation, this is a serious problem. A recent survey of 1,000 finance professionals found that 32% of accountants don’t believe they could recognise an AI-generated fake receipt.
The problem with keeping a bag of receipts
Traditional travel spending and expense processes collect receipts after the event. Employees pay out of their own pockets and then submit the receipts or email PDFs/photos later. This means that the finance team is reconciling these expenses weeks after the fact.
This delay gives forgers a lot of time to doctor receipts, increasing the value of a transaction or fabricating the evidence entirely. These receipts are incredibly hard to audit. Forgers may scrub images of all metadata – and who has time to check the metadata anyway? Finance staff are having to validate a claim without being able to see the transaction itself.
Occupational fraud is a major challenge for companies worldwide, regardless of size or sector. After Covid, which prompted a widespread shift to remote work, fraudsters took advantage of the lack of process, oversight and disjointed technologies; research shows that losses between 2022 and 2024 rose by 24%.
According to the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners’ latest global study, organisations lost $3.1bn last year alone. That comes to roughly 5% of revenue per firm.
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On-the-spot capture linked to a payment card
The easiest way to prevent forgeries slipping through the net is to mandate that all receipts are submitted instantly. This can be achieved through pairing a company card with an expense app that prompts for a receipt at the moment of purchase and anchors it to the live card authorisation.
By capturing expenses in the here and now, you preserve context (when, where and for how much) and link the evidence to the underlying payment process. If the transaction is declined or reversed, the expense never appears, and the technology ensures that the value of the receipt matches the amount leaving the account, creating a real-time verification loop.
Platforms in this space now make this capture and verify process quick and easy. With Soldo, for example, the mobile app nudges cardholders to snap the receipt as they pay, so the image, amount, merchant and VAT data are all collected in one batch.
Security is further bolstered by OCR (optical character recognition), which converts text from scanned documents and digital invoices into machine-readable, searchable data.
In companies with dispersed teams and frequent travellers, the combination of card-linked data plus instant capture can also eliminate a lot of manual grunt work for finance teams at the end of the month.
What to do about edge cases…
We’re only human and sometimes mistakes happen. You can’t completely eliminate delayed submission of receipts and expenses, but you can contain them. Treat these invoices and after-the-fact snaps of receipts as higher risk. Some companies may decide to ask for an explanatory note when a receipt isn’t captured on the spot.
An expense management platform will help you quickly root out any outliers. You don’t have to use AI to doctor a receipt – some people just lie the old-fashioned way. As one company boss told me: “I had a team member that submitted an extra 80 miles a day, over two months on their mileage expenses. When questioned he said: ‘I like to drive the scenic way to and from the office’!”
Remember, services such as Soldo also offer prepaid cards, which limit the amount staff can spend in the first place. Prepaid cards should also link to an expense management platform, which makes it easy to review and track payments.
Prepaid cards and company cards ensure that your staff aren’t paying out of their own pocket for company purchases. This is particularly relevant now, with the cost of living crisis and rising inflation leaving people with less to spend each month. With company cards, you can set payment limit and freeze cards if you need to.
Let technology help you
Yes, AI-generated fakes are on the rise, but this doesn’t have to slow you down. Don’t clamp down on expenses or add more manual checks. Instead, focus on how you can better control and manage the process. Talk to your staff about expense limits and what’s expected of them, move to a provider whereby evidence is captured at the point of payment, and share a clear, fair expense policy that your people can actually follow.
The upside is more than fraud reduction. Finance teams that move to real-time capture and matching report less admin, fewer disputes with travellers, and better spend visibility for forecasting. In an environment where fraud is already taking a measurable bite out of revenues, those improvements aren’t “nice to have” – they’re crucial to long-term operational resilience.
Finally, remember that criminals iterate. Your expense management platform should too. Make sure you choose a partner who is updating features and adding new controls as the situation evolves. If your technology makes fakes easier to spot, it will discourage people from trying their hand at pocketing some free money.
More articles by Bex Burn-Callandar
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