Does a viral image show a real restaurant bill from Le Club 55 in St. Tropez for 689,235.43 EUR? No, that's not true: It displayed a nonexistent business code and contained math errors. Le Club 55 told Lead Stories that the restaurant doesn't even serve what appeared on the receipt. Four online tools said that the image was generated by AI.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) published on X by @PascuOnFire on August 4, 2026. The original caption in Spanish read:
Pensaba que lo del final era el número de teléfono 😅
Many social media users in English-speaking countries, however, saw the automatically translated version of it:
I thought the thing at the end was the phone number 😅.
This is what the image shared in the post looked like on X at the time of writing:
(Image source: post by @PascuOnFire on X.)
Le Club 55 (archived here) is a real restaurant in the French Riviera, but the receipt widely shared on social media was not authentic.
Replying to the Lead Stories inquiry, a representative of the venue said via email on August 5, 2026:
Nous vous confirmons que ce reçu est faux. Aucun des produits qui y figurent n'est proposé à la carte dans notre restaurant. De plus, le logo imprimé sur le reçu ne correspond pas à celui de notre établissement.
Il s'agit donc d'une fausse note qui n'a pas été émise par notre restaurant.
As translated by Chrome, the restaurant's statement read:
We confirm that this receipt is fraudulent. None of the items listed on it are offered on the menu at our restaurant. Furthermore, the logo printed on the receipt does not match our establishment's logo.
This is therefore a false note that was not issued by our restaurant.
Unlike in the U.S., French-speaking countries use commas in decimals (archived here), not points, and that part appeared to be consistent with local customs. However, when calculated manually, the total before taxes was not 324,870.43 but 320,451.55. Furthermore, even if the pre-tax figure from the bill is used the amount of tax is added, it would still be below the overall total.
That was not the only problem with the image. The publicly verifiable French SIRET company registration code (archived here) seen on the "receipt" was invalid (archived here and here):
(Image source: Annuaire-entreprises.data.gouv.fr.)
The SIRET number that matched the restaurant's name and zip code was different (archived here and here).
As of this writing, Le Club 55 was labeled as a €100+ per person spot on Google Maps, but available images of the 2026 menus seen here and here suggested that the typical prices there were significantly lower than those in the viral image.
Hive Moderation said that the picture was 73.2% likely to have been made by AI:
(Image source: Hive Moderation.)
According to ZeroGPT, the image was "82% FAKE":
(Image source: ZeroGPT.)
Sightengine ruled that the odds of the receipt being a product of generative AI were 99%:
(Image source: Sightengine.)
The OpenAI verification tool further confirmed that the image was generated using OpenAI software.
(Image source: OpenAI.)
