Learn

How to spot a fake pay stub

Fake pay stubs are a solved problem for the people making them. Template sites sell convincing stubs for a few dollars, and a PDF editor turns a real stub into a better-paid one in ten minutes. The numbers and fonts usually look fine. What fakers rarely fix is the file itself, because the file keeps records they never see. If you screen pay stubs, the file is where to look first.

The math check comes first

Thirty seconds of arithmetic catches the lazy fakes. Gross pay minus listed deductions must equal net pay to the cent. Year-to-date figures must be at least as large as the current period and must grow consistently with the pay date. Social Security withholding should be 6.2 percent of taxable wages and Medicare 1.45 percent. Template fakes regularly fail one of these, because the person editing numbers updated some fields and not others.

What the file records

A real pay stub is generated by a payroll system, and its file says so. The producer field names the payroll platform or its document engine, the creation date lands on or just after the pay date, and the file has no edit layers, because nobody edits a real stub after the system generates it.

Altered and fabricated stubs tend to break that pattern one of three ways. The producer names a PDF editor or online converter instead of a payroll system. The creation date sits weeks after the claimed pay period, often suspiciously close to the application date. Or the file carries incremental updates, saved layers stacked on the original, which genuine payroll output doesn't have.

None of these file findings convicts anyone. A legitimate applicant might have a stub their HR portal exported oddly. What the findings do is tell you which applications deserve the two-minute follow-up.

The follow-up that settles it

Ask the applicant to log into their payroll portal in front of you, on their phone is fine, or to have the document sent directly from the employer or platform. Honest applicants can do this without friction. The request is reasonable, common, and legal everywhere, and it resolves nearly every flagged file without an accusation ever being made.

FAQ

What software do real pay stubs come from?

Large payroll platforms and employer systems each have recognizable document fingerprints. You don't need to memorize them: what matters is the absence of editor and converter fingerprints on a document that claims to come from a payroll system.

Are paper or scanned pay stubs safer?

No, the opposite. A scan carries no payroll-system fingerprint at all, just the scanner's, so the file evidence is thinner. Treat scans of money documents as unverified and go to the source.

Can someone fake the file evidence too?

A sophisticated forger can set metadata to plausible values. That's why the strongest screening combines the math check, the file check, and source verification for anything that matters. Each layer catches what the previous one misses.