How to Report a Fake GST Invoice or Fake GSTIN

A fake GST invoice is reported through the grievance redressal facility on the GST portal, which raises a tracked ticket, and in parallel to the jurisdictional officer shown on the GSTIN record itself. Organised fake-invoicing is handled by the Directorate General of GST Intelligence, and a consumer overcharged by a shop or restaurant has a separate route through the National Consumer Helpline. This article assumes you have already established there is a problem. If you have not, start with our guide to checking whether a GST number is fake and come back once the portal has told you something is wrong.

Three different things people call a fake invoice

The phrase covers three distinct problems, and the channel that will actually act on your complaint depends on which one you have. Sorting this out before you write anything saves a month of the complaint being forwarded between offices.

An invoice quoting a GSTIN that is not the supplier's

The number on the bill does not exist on the portal, or it resolves to a different legal name in a different state. This is the most common complaint and, as it happens, the one least likely to be fraud. It is also the easiest to establish: the portal record either matches the name on the invoice or it does not. Where the portal returns nothing at all, our note on what a no records found result actually means covers the innocent explanations worth eliminating first.

An unregistered business charging GST

Only a person registered under GST may collect tax. A trader below the registration threshold, or one whose registration has been cancelled, who nonetheless adds a GST line to the bill is collecting money they have no authority to collect and no mechanism to remit. This is a specific statutory wrong rather than a general grievance, and we cover the mechanics of it in charging GST without registration.

Invoices with no underlying supply

The serious one. Here the supplier is genuinely registered, the GSTIN checks out perfectly, and the invoice is still fake, because nothing was ever supplied. These invoices exist to move input tax credit, often through a chain of shell entities that file returns for a few months and then vanish. A GSTIN check will not catch this on its own. What catches it is the absence of the goods: no e-way bill, no delivery documentation, no transporter, a registered address that is a residential flat, and a filing pattern that starts abruptly.

What to do before you report

The practical sequence is verify, ask, withhold, then report — in that order, and the middle two steps are the ones people skip.

Ask the supplier in writing. Email, not a phone call, and state plainly what you searched and what came back. Give them a few working days. A supplier whose GSTIN has been suspended for non-filing will usually say so, and a supplier who has been printing a superseded number on an old template will simply reissue. Neither of those is a complaint worth filing; both need the invoice corrected before you can claim credit. Our explanation of what suspended status means is useful context if that is what the portal shows, because suspension is a reversible administrative state rather than an accusation.

Withhold the tax component. If the GSTIN cannot be confirmed, pay the taxable value and hold back the tax until it is. Once the money has gone, you are in the far weaker position of asking for it back from someone who may not answer. Many procurement teams write this into their standard terms precisely so that it is not a negotiation each time.

What to gather first

Every channel below will ask for broadly the same file. Assemble it once and the complaint takes twenty minutes rather than a week of chasing your own records.

• The original invoice, as issued, including the supplier's declared address and the invoice number and date. Keep the PDF or the paper copy rather than a retyped summary.
• The GSTIN exactly as printed, character for character, including any formatting the supplier used. If you correct a typo when transcribing it, you have destroyed the evidence.
• A dated screenshot of the portal search result showing the discrepancy — no record, a different legal name, a cancelled or suspended status.
• Proof of payment, ideally a bank statement line or NEFT advice rather than a cash receipt.
• Correspondence with the supplier, including the email that went unanswered.
• The purchase order or contract, and any delivery challan, e-way bill or goods receipt note tying the invoice to something that physically moved.
• The GSTR-2B for the relevant period, if you are a business, showing the invoice is absent from your auto-drafted credit statement.

The dated screenshot matters more than it looks. Registration status is not a permanent attribute — a GSTIN that is cancelled today may have been perfectly active when the invoice was issued, and one that is active today may have been suspended then. Your screenshot fixes what the public record said on a specific date, which is what an officer needs to establish the timeline, and it also protects you: it shows you exercised diligence at the point of the transaction. Teams handling volume usually automate this, storing the verified response against the vendor master — the pattern we describe in vendor GST verification for accounts payable.

The official reporting channels

Contact details for these move, and departmental email addresses in particular get reorganised. Take the current details from gst.gov.in or cbic-gst.gov.in rather than from a third-party listing, which is how people end up sending a fraud complaint to a number that stopped working two years ago.

Two of these deserve a note. The portal grievance facility is the one to start with because it produces a reference number, and a reference number is what turns a complaint into something with a status. The jurisdictional officer route is the one people do not know exists: every GSTIN record on the portal displays the centre and state jurisdiction for that taxpayer, so the portal itself tells you which office to write to. You do not need to guess, and you do not need a directory.

For the third category — invoices with no supply — the useful signal is not the GSTIN at all but the supplier's behaviour over time. A vendor whose returns stop, restart, or were never filed despite issuing substantial invoices is worth flagging with specifics, which is why checking a supplier's return filing status is worth doing before you write. Where you are looking across a whole vendor base rather than one invoice, the techniques in our note on automated GST fraud detection describe what to watch for at scale.

If you are an individual, not a business

A consumer who has been charged GST by a shop that turns out not to be registered, or charged at a rate above the notified one, is not really making a tax complaint at all. No input tax credit is at stake; the loss is simply the money overcharged. That is consumer protection territory, and the National Consumer Helpline and the Central Consumer Protection Authority handle unfair trade practices of exactly this shape. The tax authorities will still want to know about an unregistered trader collecting GST, so filing both is reasonable, but the refund of your money is more likely to come from the consumer route. Before you file either, check the bill against the requirements in our guide to GST invoice format and rules: a document missing the supplier's GSTIN, an invoice number or the tax breakup is not a valid tax invoice, which is itself the point.

Your own exposure as the buyer

This is the part readers underestimate, and it is the real reason to act rather than to shrug and file the invoice. Input tax credit taken on an invoice without an underlying supply is recoverable from you, the recipient, together with interest and penalty. The department does not have to catch the supplier first, and in the cases that matter the supplier has usually disappeared, which is precisely why recovery proceeds against the buyer who is still there and still solvent.

Two provisions do most of the work. Section 16(2)(c) makes your entitlement to credit conditional on the tax charged having actually been paid to the government by the supplier — so a supplier who bills you, collects the tax and never remits it can strip your credit even where the underlying supply was entirely genuine. Section 122(1A) extends penalty to a person who retains the benefit of specified transactions and at whose instance they are conducted, which is aimed squarely at the beneficiary of a fake-invoice chain rather than only at the entity that issued the paper.

The practical consequence is that the burden falls on you to show the supply was real. What discharges it is not an assertion but a record: payment made through a banking channel rather than in cash, e-way bills and transporter documents for goods that moved, a goods receipt note or delivery acknowledgement, a contract that predates the invoice, and evidence that you checked the supplier's registration and filing status before you paid. Those artefacts are cheap to keep and almost impossible to reconstruct two years later when a notice arrives.

What the offender faces

Section 122 of the CGST Act sets out monetary penalties for a list of offences that includes issuing an invoice without an actual supply, issuing an invoice using another registered person's identification number, collecting tax and failing to pay it to the government within the prescribed period, and taking credit on an invoice without receiving the goods or services. The penalty is generally framed as the higher of a fixed sum or an amount pegged to the tax evaded or the credit wrongly taken.

Section 132 layers criminal liability on top for the more serious cases. Supplying goods or services without an invoice, issuing an invoice without a supply, and fraudulently availing input tax credit are all listed offences, and the maximum term of imprisonment is graded by the amount of tax evaded or credit wrongly availed. Above a prescribed amount the offence becomes cognizable and non-bailable, which is the threshold that makes arrest possible without a warrant. Those monetary thresholds have been amended since GST was introduced, so read the current text of Sections 122 and 132 rather than a figure quoted in an older article.

Can you report anonymously?

Broadly, yes. The helpline and the departmental email routes will accept information without a named complainant, and enforcement wings act on anonymous intelligence routinely, particularly where what you are describing is a pattern rather than a single transaction. The portal grievance facility is different: it is raised against your login, so it is inherently identified.

The trade-off is real. An anonymous complaint has no ticket number, no acknowledgement and nobody who can call you for the one missing document, so it either triggers something internally or it does not, and you will never find out which. An identified complaint is traceable and, more usefully, keeps a record that you raised the issue on a specific date — which is worth having if the same invoice comes back at you in a credit reversal notice later. If your concern is the commercial relationship rather than personal safety, the identified route is usually better, and you can search the counterparty yourself first using the free GST number search tool so that you know exactly what you are alleging before you put your name to it.

Frequently asked questions