The fact that workers with expense accounts still feel they're getting paid so little that they deserve to commit fraud says something about that stratum of employee.

Businesses are increasingly being deceived by employees using artificial intelligence for an age-old scam: faking expense receipts.

The launch of new image-generation models by top AI groups such as OpenAI and Google in recent months has sparked an influx of AI-generated receipts submitted internally within companies, according to leading expense software platforms.

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

About 30 percent 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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[–] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The fact that workers with expense accounts still feel they’re getting paid so little that they deserve to commit fraud says something about that stratum of employee.

Pretty much anyone who travels has to submit receipts. Most people who travel are not making bank. They're the people who set up and stand at convention booths, sales staff support, assistants, videographers, etc. Also, most travel is a miserable ordeal. I'm not saying it's okay to commit fraud, but let's not equate the hourly employee "re-creating" his lost lunch receipt with a 6-figure income.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I used to be required to track all the receipts for travel years ago, and at some point like a decade ago the state figured out way more money was being spent on budgeting, reimbursing, and auditing each purchase individually than they would save by just doing a flat per diem rate for food and incidental expenses based on travel location.

    I still keep my receipts long enough to make sure I'm not going over what I will be reimbursed, but shred them when I get home.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    in my country it used to be like this for 50 years, you get flat rate per day, counted up to fractions of day, separately for accomodation and food + everything else. you only have to keep transportation tickets

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    But why? It's so easy to make your own face receipts.

    Especially when you get an email receipt. Just inspect element that bad boy.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    Meanwhile I'm out here like "wow I hope I submitted my receipt correctly and do not get banished to the shadow realm"

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    AI creates demand for fraud detection by enabling fraud. It's a brilliant business case worthy of McKinsey's consultants. Right up there with auto-glass companies giving 8 year old kids free slingshots and bags of ballbearings.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Also I think that is what happens with Cloudflare. I mean I can imagine they have agencies to put load on popular websites, just to offer them the solution. At least it makes sense from business point, so I can't be the only one coming up with it.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    behold, disruption

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yes fapiao culture!

    The bar i used to drink at in SW china would write fake receipts for business travellers. The one time i was there for it a dutch guy came in, bought an expensive bottle of maotai for everyone to share, then the owners wrote him a receipt for twice that much. The patrons got drunk, the bar got paid and the guy got to steal from his company.

    Just your classic win/win/win.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    I feel like AI would just fuck it up with hallucinations or something. Faking a receipt would be trivial even for an idiot.

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  • 20 comments in c/fuck_ai@lemmy.world view that post
    [–] 48 points 1 year ago* (7 children)

    Pretty easy problem to solve, just issue company cards and stop making people use their own cards for work purposes and then reimbursing them.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago

    My last employer did that, and that's probably what'll happen if this gets abused too much. I wasn't a fan of it though. It was easier to do expenses with my own card, and as a bonus I got the points. They eventually forced us to use the company card for flights though; too many points to give up I guess.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    And here the company I'm working at stopped handing out company cards because people just never made sure to get receipts/invoices for things paid with those. You really can't win this particular battle as company I feel.

    Yes, I'm fully aware that companies behave like blood-sucking pos things the majority of the time. Yet as someone who works in accounting it's just so incredibly hard to make people acknowledge that getting proper invoices is important. And even if they do sort of get it, give it a week and plenty forget it again...

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    So every time there's an unexplained payment on the card without an invoice, it gets flagged as fraud and the card gets frozen.

    I bet you get maybe two instances of this before people start remembering to submit invoices. Make them wait two hours to clear and reactivate the card every time this happens.

    You're in Sri Lanka and your company card isn't working? Damn that sucks, let me look into why. Oh, it looks like there's an unexplained expense on the card that has been flagged for fraud and the card is not operable. Please submit an invoice for all company card expenses as soon as possible to avoid this in the future.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So every time there's an unexplained payment on the card without an invoice, it gets flagged as fraud and the card gets frozen.

    Except noone has the time to actually do this every single time, on top of the bank taking time to process this. I can promise you the bank would riot very soon if you keep doing this and then refuse to give your company access to any credit cards at all and instead point to alternatives.

    At least for the country I live in, I'm not from the US.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I can enable or disable an individual credit card using an app on my phone in 30 seconds. A large proportion of my customers leave their cards locked by default and then unlock it for a minute when it's time to pay for something. I promise you that a corporate account has something similar. You don't need to call the bank and report fraud every time you do this, just disable the card from the customer control panel and then re-enable it when you get your invoices. This never needs to even involve a bank employee unless you really do have a real instance of fraud that you then need to backcharge.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    That sure is very different from the country I live in then. I definitely can't lock/unlock my personal credit card within a second by using the bank's app as I wish and neither can anyone else I know. And that one credit card locking case I got to witnesses on corporate level was just next level garbage for all kinds of reasons, including bank taking ages to react.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    The company I work for is super anal about it. If you abuse the company card, it’s taken away at the corporate level. That person and their boss are left deciding how to handle it.

    I’ve seen it end in termination for a sale guy who got his card privileges revoked and then let go because he couldn’t travel to do his job. He likely had other issues though that lead up to it, but I don’t know much more than the CC story.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago

    crazy people are using AI for this when you could cook them up on a word document.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I don't understand embezzlement. Why risk your entire career over a comparatively small amount of money?

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    [–] 22 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    One use I'm honestly fine with on the whole. Fleecing your company is always morally correct.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Some of us work for nonprofits

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  • [+] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)
  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Hence it's not always morally correct

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  • [+] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)
  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago
    [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Receipt Hog?

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