Fake pay stubs are fuelling rental fraud
A pay stub is the document a landlord trusts most and verifies least. It arrives as a PDF, the numbers look plausible, and the decision to hand over keys often rests on it. That trust is exactly why forged proof-of-income is now one of the most common documents behind rental fraud.
Why pay stubs are so easy to fake
Unlike a bank statement, a pay stub has no single issuer and no reference template a verifier can compare against. Free online generators produce a clean PDF with any salary you type in, complete with a logo and tax lines. Generative AI has made the result indistinguishable from a real one on screen.
What a forged stub cannot hide
What changes the picture is the file itself. A genuine stub is exported once by payroll software; an edited or generated one carries the fingerprints of an editor — author and producer metadata naming Word, Canva or a PDF editor, a modification date after the pay period, and fonts that differ column to column. These are the same tells covered in our guide to spotting a fake pay stub.
Verify before you sign
For a tenancy decision worth thousands, a few minutes of forensic verification is cheap insurance. See the playbook for landlords, or upload the PDF for a free preliminary check.