How to check if an invoice is genuine
An invoice can be produced in under a minute with an AI tool or a free template. Here are the signs you can check yourself, and the traces that only show up inside the file.
Updated 2026-08-31 · Veriflied
Why fake invoices became a problem
A few years ago a convincing fake invoice took time and some technical skill. Today you ask an AI service for an invoice from a given shop with a given amount and get a PDF that looks right. Claims departments, accounts-payable teams and caseworkers therefore see more fabricated documents than ever, and most cannot be spotted by eye.
The good news is that an invoice is more than what you can see. The file itself carries traces from the software that produced it. Those traces are hard to fake, because most people making fake invoices do not know they exist.
What you can check yourself
The issuer
Does the company exist? Do the registration number, address and bank account match the official register and the company's own website? Fake invoices often reuse real company names with wrong account numbers.
Invoice number and dates
Is the invoice number realistic for a company of that size? Do invoice date, delivery date and due date agree with each other and with the story the invoice is supposed to support?
VAT and totals
Do the maths. AI-made invoices often have VAT amounts that do not match the rate, or totals that do not add up. The numbers were generated, not calculated.
Language and typography
Mixed languages, wrong thousands separators, a perfectly uniform layout without the small irregularities a real accounting system produces.
Payment details
Call the company on a number you find yourself, not the one on the invoice, and ask about the invoice number. Two minutes, and it resolves most cases.
What only shows inside the file
Real invoices come from accounting or point-of-sale systems. Those systems write their name into the PDF metadata and produce the file in a single pass with a fixed structure. An invoice made by a generic PDF library (ReportLab, wkhtmltopdf and the like), a browser or a word processor did not come from a billing system. That is the strongest single signal there is.
Then there are the timestamps. The file remembers when it was created and modified. If an invoice for a 2023 purchase was first created as a file last week, it is not the document the shop issued. If it was saved several times, the earlier version often still sits physically inside the file and can be extracted and compared.
Finally there is the image of the document itself, if it is a photo or a scan. Here an AI detector can determine whether the pixels were generated by an image model, however convincing the result looks.
In practice
Start with the cheap checks: the register, a phone call, the arithmetic. If you are still in doubt, or have many documents to check, let a forensic analysis look at the file. VeriFly reads the producer chain, timestamps, revision history and image layer in one report, and you can try it free on your own documents.
Frequently asked questions
Can you tell from a PDF that it was made by AI?
Often, yes. Not because the file says so, but because AI tools produce PDFs with generic libraries rather than billing systems. Combined with timestamps and missing issuer identity, that forms a clear pattern.
What if the invoice is a photo or a scan?
Then the PDF traces are gone and the analysis moves to the image: camera information, compression and an AI detector that assesses whether the picture itself was generated. A photo of a 'receipt' that never existed physically usually has no real camera chain.
Is a wrong VAT amount proof of fraud?
No, but it is a reason to look closer. Real systems calculate correctly. Errors in VAT and totals are far more common in fabricated documents.
Can I check an invoice for free?
Yes. Create a VeriFly account and analyse your first 10 documents at no cost. You get a report with the concrete findings, not just a score.
What should I do if the invoice looks fake?
Do not pay, and keep the file as it is without opening and re-saving it (that overwrites traces). Contact the issuer through a channel you found yourself, and in serious cases the police.
Try it on your own document
Create an account and analyse your first 10 images or documents for free. You get a report with the concrete findings, not just a score. All processing in the EU.