Companies Battle Wave of AI-Generated Fake Expense Receipts (ft.com) 65
Employees are using AI to generate fake expense receipts. Leading expense software platforms report a sharp increase in AI-created fraudulent documents following the launch of improved image generation models by OpenAI and Google. AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for 14% of fraudulent documents submitted in September compared with none last year. Ramp flagged more than one million dollars in fraudulent invoices within 90 days. About 30% of financial professionals in the US and UK surveyed by Medius reported seeing a rise in falsified receipts after OpenAI released GPT-4o last year.
SAP Concur processes more than 80 million compliance checks monthly and now warns customers to not trust their eyes. The receipts include wrinkles in paper, detailed itemization matching real menus and signatures. Creating fraudulent documents previously required photo editing skills or paying for such services. Free and accessible image generation software has made it possible for anyone to falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.
SAP Concur processes more than 80 million compliance checks monthly and now warns customers to not trust their eyes. The receipts include wrinkles in paper, detailed itemization matching real menus and signatures. Creating fraudulent documents previously required photo editing skills or paying for such services. Free and accessible image generation software has made it possible for anyone to falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.
What is AI used for? (Score:1)
AI doesn't generate well detailed images to be used this way, what's the angle here or is this just another ad for "AI"?
Re:What is AI used for? (Score:5, Informative)
AI doesn't generate well detailed images to be used this way,
In fact, it does, if one knows what one is doing (we've seen them in retail return fraud attempts). And it's easier to learn and faster to do than the old fashioned way with Photoshop.
(Still an overblown story, but it's not made up.)
Re:What is AI used for? (Score:4)
I do find that many peoples understanding of what generative AI can produce today is actually highly influenced by what they thought it could do 2-3 years ago. In other words, expectations haven't changed, but the tech has certainly exceeded them by this point.
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I do find that many peoples understanding of what generative AI can produce today is actually highly influenced by what they thought it could do 2-3 years ago.
Hell, you could even say 2-3 months ago and still be right more often than not right now. I don't think I've seen any technology move so damn fast.
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I'm getting the impression that we may be living through the singularity now. The incident that brought it home for me was actually about two months ago when I was drawn into an email dialog with an extremely persuasive celebrity GAIvatar. The authenticity of the email was quite astounding to me. The first pitch was a kind of sales thing that meshed quite well with some videos the celebrity had made a while before, and it raised a couple of interesting questions. I politely declined the sale but asked one o
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It's pretty fucking scary, actually.
We've had to add filters on outbound email to quarantine any communications to unrecognized destinations for review.
I suppose if we want to drown in irony, we could have an LLM do the review...
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Basically the ACK, but me thinks you don't want to read the book on the phone spyware. Might give you nightmares or worse. "Back in the good ol' days" that kind of personalized targeting had to be done by hand, even if computers helped with the research, but now they can do it on a wholesale level. And if you live in the wrong place the act of getting associated with that book might be sufficient "probable cause" for a warrant against your phone number...
Re: What is AI used for? (Score:2)
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I write mostly to clarify my own thinking and I listen to YouTube mostly for the humor. The intersection in this case was that the author wrote a rather interesting book that I read a few years ago and sometimes he does YouTube videos recommending other books. Ergo, I can be triggered to commenting on related books he missed or recommendations I'm skeptical about after having read the book in question.
But I certainly acknowledge that the "cloud" of comments on YouTube is mostly BS, and almost surely generat
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In fact, it does, if one knows what one is doing (we've seen them in retail return fraud attempts). And it's easier to learn and faster to do than the old fashioned way with Photoshop.
Photoshop itself has had "AI" tools for awhile.
Re: What is AI used for? (Score:3)
Is the advantage of LLMs that you don't have to learn photoshop, you can just use natural language?
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AI doesn't generate well detailed images to be used this way
That's one of the few things it excels at!
For some time now image generation exceeds most peoples meme making skills, and can trivially reproduce those comic style scenes and align text in their respective spots.
It can even make some realistic looking fake terminal screens, so long as you don't ask it to copy the matrix.
Long gone are the days it spits out images where your first thought is "Am I having a stroke?" and too many fingers on a human hand.
(Yea I know saying it's main usage is making memes isn't h
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Survior bias. The AI fraud people were caught. Do you know how many people using photoshop are not caught?
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True. The comparison was mostly to tell about survivor bias, not as a quantitative comparison between AI and Photoshop, which are both evolving (and possibly converging) tools.
Expensivg hookers and blow (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Expensivg hookers and blow (Score:5, Funny)
Tell your dealer and pimp you need real receipts, obviously.
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"Insert credit card here"
"Swipe your card here"
"Tap here to pay"
My tip of 20% must not be enough.
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Mag strip reader in the butt crack?
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I can believe it. Atlanta is the only place I've ever seen a motorcycle cop give a hooker a ride.
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a ride for a ride?
Is security through obscurity good? (Score:2)
Didn't slashdot tell me that was a bad idea 25 years ago? Have we backslid?
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If only we could read the article. (Score:4, Informative)
I do not have a $120/year subscription to the Financial Times. Can someone just post what percentage of SAP's 80 million monthly compliance checks are showing evidence of fraud using AI?
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No such data is given, instead the article provides "CFOs think this and that" and "Financial professionals see an increase". The most credible number is "14% of all fakes have been created with AI tools", but it's still not mentioned, which percentage is seen as fake overall. As expected it also advertises ways for companies to make that problem go away by spending money on software.
If you don't believe my words, read for yourself here [archive.is]
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Thank you for this and I agree. There's insufficient information in the article to suggest that there's an increase in fraud, but there is the suggestion that fraud is using AI-generated receipt images.
Having finally read the article, wow this is just a bad article.
Software provider AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for about 14 per cent of fraudulent documents submitted in September, compared with none last year.
That can just mean that some people are using AI to generate fake receipts instead of printing/modifying their own.
About 30 per cent of US and UK financial professionals surveyed by expense management platform Medius reported they had seen a rise in falsified receipts following the launch of OpenAI’s GPT-4o last year.
So (potentially) 30% of companies have seen "a rise" in false receipts. That rise is not defined.
Research by SAP in July found that nearly 70 per cent of chief financial officers believed their employees were using AI to attempt to falsify travel expenses or receipts, with about 10 per cent adding they are certain it has happened in their company.
So only 10% say that they know th
Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Fire those that turn in fraudulent receipts and prosecute if the amount justifies it. The others will get the message real fast.
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I would not be surprised that more get caught because AI is not good with text in images. Numbers probably do not add up,
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Re: Solution (Score:2)
https://chatgpt.com/share/6900... [chatgpt.com]
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Or- better- how about you try to get a good result out of it
Lame.
Re: Solution (Score:2)
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You gave it the bare minimum of instruction- you left it to its own devices for selecting what to put on it.
Let's look at the original post you replied to:
Modern models can handle words perfectly- even in difficult situations like a word going through a fold that transforms the other half of its bounding box, for example.
This is, and remains, true.
You, in an effort to build a soapbox made of straw, used what can only be described as deliberately little effort, and then pointed out "Aha! See?!" when it predictably failed. Only it didn't even fail to meet the actual benchmark, just the benchmark you imagined for it.
Re: Solution (Score:2)
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Indeed. Fraud is not new, nor is AI responsible for the dishonesty of a person who uses it for this purpose.
Re:Solution (Score:4, Informative)
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Then those corporations need enemas.
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What AI does best (Score:3)
is be a copy cat.
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iReckonator 2000. (Score:2)
(Previously, an Employee) ”Hey boss! Got that email you sent me. That fake AI letter you sent me about my termination? Ha! That’s a good one! Almost fooled me there for a minute.”
(T-Accounting 101) ”Yeah, about your TPS expense reports..did you get the memo that said don’t fucking steal shit? That was kind of a central theme in all those mandatory ethics courses.”
IRS... (Score:2)
Who wants to bet that the IRS suddenly has a massive drop in taxes paid by small businesses this year.
Because receipts are a lot more important to the IRS than to corporations, and the current leadership is NOT very interested in investigating fraud by business men.
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The IRS can care anytime from now until I die.
Unless there are plans for Cyborg Trump, we will generally continue to assume that we'll be audited at some point.
Transparency and verification (Score:2)
Easiest solution is to issue employees a corporate credit card that they are responsible for. All reimbursable expenses have to be correlated against the copy of the statement issued by the credit card company to the corporation.
But what about cash expenses, you ask? Issue a per-diem for travel, and a periodic "here's your budget for IT refresh, whatever you don't spend, you get to keep."
My question is, what kind of receipt fraud are we looking at? Invented expenses that they're using to defraud the comp
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Easiest solution is to issue employees a corporate credit card that they are responsible for. All reimbursable expenses have to be correlated against the copy of the statement issued by the credit card company to the corporation.
But what about cash expenses, you ask? Issue a per-diem for travel, and a periodic "here's your budget for IT refresh, whatever you don't spend, you get to keep."
Clean and simple. You're a man of reason.
My question is, what kind of receipt fraud are we looking at? Invented expenses that they're using to defraud the company, or real expenses that normally wouldn't be reimbursed that they're disguising as reimbursable ones?
Probably both.
Also, wouldn't invoice fraud be a bigger threat?
Can't speak to all companies, but AP handles there here. It's their job to validate every invoice before it is paid out with people on our side of the transaction.
They also track changes to recurring invoices, and verify those changes.
but with the bank details modified to point to the scammer's accounts instead?
These happen. We've had 2 this year.
what about resort and other forced fees that are n (Score:2)
what about resort and other forced fees that are not reimbursable and workers are forced to make up ones that are reimbursable so they are not out pocket?
People doing Malicious Compliance and putting in reimbursable that per rules they can get 100% but it looks very automated.
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Not reimbursable?
What shitty employer is that? Name them!
I've never worked somewhere where every single penny of legit business expense wasn't reimbursable, except tips beyond 20%.
Hmm (Score:2)
Creating fraudulent documents previously required photo editing skills or paying for such services. Free and accessible image generation software has made it possible for anyone to falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.
C'mon, it wasn't all that hard.
Relying on scans of pieces of paper always had a big whiff of theater about it.
Not just deliberate fakes (Score:1)
So... (Score:2)
AI even replaced the people digging in the restaurant's waste bins?
I'm shocked! :-)
How big a problem is this really? (Score:2)
I get keeping an eye out for it, but I get the feeling this is more an "Ooga Booga, BE AFRAID! Use our service!" kind of story.
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In the 80s I was told "Use the corporate credit card for everything over $5. You'll need to provide the credit card statement to cross check with the receipts" but maybe that's not done anymore. They didn't mind a $4 lunch (I'm talking a cheap sandwich here) or toll money with a receipt but maybe the checks were tighter then?
For most companies it's easier to just use per diem and let the employee cover anything else overall. Now that's for food/drinks. We still needed receipts for things like parking and tolls, but with how stringent most card companies are today they know if you paid a toll or for parking because of the vendor ID. So I log into Concur, and it knows what the vendor is, and sometimes even pre-populates it as a specific type of expense. Then it just becomes having the receipt picture, or the bill breakdown (for
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per toll? some systems are like you need to TOP up $$ into the toll account.
Per diem vs expense (Score:2)
I've had jobs that pay per diem (set amount per day) and others that have you submit receipts. Per diem is so much easier and likely cheaper since I put zero effort in tracking costs on those trips while I've literally spent a day or more tallying expense reports full of $5-20 receipts. That doesn't also include the time to be sure to collect and track them down while on trips.