{"id":79021,"date":"2025-08-20T01:19:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T01:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/79021\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T01:19:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T01:19:09","slug":"how-employees-are-using-ai-to-fudge-receipts-for-business-expenses-and-how-to-spot-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/79021\/","title":{"rendered":"How employees are using AI to fudge receipts for business expenses – and how to spot them"},"content":{"rendered":"

AI<\/a> is being used by office fraudsters to fiddle their expenses, a cybersecurity expert has warned.<\/p>\n

Many places of work will ask their employees to upload a photo of a receipt they need reimbursing for before their expense is approved.<\/p>\n

Scammers don’t need sophisticated skills in technology or Photoshop anymore, because now it is as easy as asking a chatbot to create a receipt for a business transaction that never happened.<\/p>\n

Even with minor errors that AI models can sometimes make, these are likely to be missed by the managers approving claims as they often have so many to sift through.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Jake Moore, the Global Cybersecurity Advisor for ESET, said the scam is scarily realistic and can fly past under the nose of financial teams.<\/p>\n

He told the Daily Mail: ‘AI has enabled crime<\/a> to be sped up and become accessible to many more people.<\/p>\n

‘Tools like Photoshop can be difficult and take a long time to learn. Now with AI, just by speaking in a natural language to it and giving it a prompt you can get what you want.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘If you ask it to make you one from scratch it can look fake, but if you start the prompt with a real receipt, it is impressively quick. It’s shocking how it looks extremely realistic.’<\/p>\n

\"AI <\/p>\n

AI is being used by office fraudsters to fiddle their expenses, a cybersecurity expert has warned. The cyber expert put a chatbot to the test and made a \u00a338.20 Starbucks receipt that could trick almost anyone<\/p>\n

The cyber expert put a chatbot to the test and made a \u00a338.20 Starbucks receipt that could trick almost anyone. And it can be done all in a matter of seconds.<\/p>\n

Mr Moore added: ‘AI images can sometimes look generated, but in a situation where you’re someone in a financial team going through these quickly and at masse, it could get through.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘It’s a potential area that financial teams aren’t thinking about and can go under the radar quite easily.<\/p>\n

‘People have said “why would you risk getting caught for an extra \u00a335”, but we are in a cost-of-living crisis, and this could be of interest to someone who wants to try and claim a bit of extra money.<\/p>\n

‘We have a shop theft issue in this country where we see people brazenly walking out with bags of shopping because there is something like a threshold of \u00a3200 where police won’t get involved,’ and little thefts are a small win for some people, he said.<\/p>\n

Mr Moore said the ease and sophistication of this kind of fraud can be difficult to mitigate against, ‘especially when they look so authentic’.<\/p>\n

He advised businesses to start handing out company credit cards instead as he urged to increase awareness around manipulating AI for financial gain.<\/p>\n

‘If they’re using their own card to claim reimbursements, it’s likely to be a small amount as you will usually need a company card to make a big purchase, which can also be a good way to be able to monitor payments and mitigate against it.<\/p>\n

\"People <\/p>\n

People often spot scam emails and texts because they are badly written but some chatbots can easily create messages that convincingly impersonate businesses and official bodies<\/p>\n

‘Financial teams should look out for blurry text, misaligned formatting and the VAT number.<\/p>\n

‘If it’s a fake, when cross-checked [using a VAT number service] the shop at the top at the receipt won’t be correct.<\/p>\n

‘We all need to raise our awareness.’<\/p>\n

It comes as experts have warned that online fraudsters could use AI to launch a wave of convincing scams.<\/p>\n

Cybersecurity company Norton warned that criminals are turning to AI tools such as ChatGPT<\/a> to generate extremely convincing phishing emails and create \u2018lures\u2019 to rob victims.<\/p>\n

Chatbots also completely remove the language barrier for cybercriminal gangs around the world, warns Julia O\u2019Toole, CEO of MyCena Security Solutions.<\/p>\n

She said: \u2018Phishing has come on significantly since email scams first hit inboxes, but a lack of proficiency in language and culture has still been a major barrier for scammers, who have struggled to make their emails realistic.’<\/p>\n

People often spot scam emails and texts because they are badly written but some chatbots can easily create messages that convincingly impersonate businesses and official bodies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Consumer group Which? previously asked ChatGPT to create an email telling the recipient someone had logged into their PayPal account.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In seconds, it produced a professionally written email with the heading \u2018Important Security Notice \u2013 Unusual Activity Detected on Your PayPal Account\u2019.<\/p>\n

It included steps on how to secure the account and links to reset a password and contact customer support.<\/p>\n

But fraudsters would be able to use these links to redirect recipients to their malicious sites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AI is being used by office fraudsters to fiddle their expenses, a cybersecurity expert has warned. Many places…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":79022,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,97,50,335,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-79021","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-dailymail","12":"tag-news","13":"tag-paypal","14":"tag-technology","15":"tag-uk","16":"tag-united-kingdom","17":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=79021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79021\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/79022"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=79021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=79021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=79021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}