Software provider AppZen said fake AI receipts accounted for about 14 per cent of fraudulent documents submitted in September, compared with none last year. Fintech group Ramp said its new software flagged more than $1mn in fraudulent invoices within 90 days.

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.

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Creating fraudulent documents previously required skills in photo editing or paying for such services through online vendors. The advent of free and accessible image generation software has made it easy for employees to quickly falsify receipts in seconds by writing simple text instructions to chatbots.

Several receipts shown to the FT by expense management platforms demonstrated the realistic nature of the images, which included wrinkles in paper, detailed itemisation that matched real-life menus, and signatures.

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The rise in these more realistic copies has led companies to turn to AI to help detect fake receipts, as most are too convincing to be found by human reviewers.

The software works by scanning receipts to check the metadata of the image to discover whether an AI platform created it. However, this can be easily removed by users taking a photo or a screenshot of the picture.

To combat this, it also considers other contextual information by examining details such as repetition in server names and times and broader information about the employee’s trip.