What happened
In May 2026, EY Canada published a report about cyber threats and fraud in loyalty programmes, the points and rewards schemes run by shops and airlines.
Researchers at GPTZero checked its sources. Of the 27, more than 70% were made up or pointed to the wrong place. Links to Forbes, McKinsey, Gartner, TechCrunch and Wired went nowhere or to articles that never existed. One figure, a $200 billion market size, appeared twice with two different meanings and sources.
EY Canada pulled the report. By then it had already been run in more than 60 Australian newspapers.
Why it went wrong
The researchers described it as “a collage of misattributions, inaccurate statistics and AI-written text.” AI writing tools will happily add sources that look real. Nobody clicked the links before it went out.
Impact
- A well-known firm’s name on a report full of errors, repeated across dozens of newspapers.
- It follows a similar case at Deloitte, which partly refunded a government over AI errors in a report.
The lesson
- Click every link. If the source doesn’t open, or doesn’t say what you claim, take it out.
- Big names make bad facts spread faster. Newspapers reran this because it came from EY.
- Readers can check too. This was caught by outsiders, not the firm.