Your Applicant’s Pay Stub Looks Perfect. Here’s How It Can Still Be Fake.

You did everything right. You asked for pay stubs. The numbers add up — gross, deductions, net, year-to-date. The layout looks like a real payroll export. So you approved the applicant. Three months later, the rent stops, and you discover the employer on that stub never existed.

This is the fraud that catches careful landlords, because it exploits the exact thing you were taught to check: the numbers on the document.

The math is the easy part to fake

A convincing fake pay stub takes minutes to produce. Template generators sell them for a few dollars, and they get the arithmetic perfect: hours times rate equals gross, gross minus deductions equals net, the year-to-date figure climbs at exactly the right pace. Some even copy the layout of ADP, Paychex, or Gusto down to the font.

So when you “check the pay stub,” a good fake passes — because internal correctness is the one thing a forger can nail every time. Verifying the numbers on a document only proves the document is internally consistent. It says nothing about whether the money, or the employer, is real.

The employer is the part they can’t fake

What a forger can’t manufacture is a real company standing behind the stub. A legitimate employer leaves a trail in the real world:

• It’s a registered business on file with the state.
• It has a real, verifiable commercial address — an office, not a house or a mailbox store.
• Its phone number routes to the actual company.
• It has some kind of online footprint — a website, a listing, reviews.
• The tax withholdings on the stub follow the fixed statutory rates.

When a stub looks flawless but the company behind it evaporates under real-world scrutiny — not in any business registry, no commercial address, a phone that doesn’t match — that mismatch is the fraud signal. Which is why confirming the employer is a real company matters far more than squinting at the document. In fact, a *perfect-looking* stub attached to an *unverifiable* employer is often more suspicious than a sloppy one, because it points to deliberate work.

What to actually check

Stop trying to catch fakes by staring harder at the document. Instead, verify the world outside it:

• Look the employer up in the state’s business registry. A company that pays W-2 wages should be registered.
• Search the address. Is it a real commercial location, or a suburban rooftop?
• Find the employer’s phone independently — and confirm the stub’s number matches it (never call the number printed on the stub).
• Check the tax lines. Social Security is always 6.2% and Medicare 1.45% of the same wage base; a fake often gets the ratio wrong.

That’s exactly what ProofSweep does — it re-runs the math, then cross-checks the employer against business registries, the open web, the actual map and street view of the address, and the tax rules. If the stub is internally clean but the employer can’t be confirmed, the report says so in plain English and tells you what to do next.

A pay stub that looks right isn’t the same as an employer that *is* right. The second one is what protects your rent.