How to Find Out Who Charged Your Credit Card

An unfamiliar charge is usually a familiar purchase wearing an unfamiliar name. The line on your statement is a billing descriptor — a short text string the merchant's payment processor sends to the card network — and it often shows a legal entity, a parent company, a payment provider, or an abbreviation instead of the brand you dealt with. Most of the time the charge is real; the job is to decode the line.

Work through the steps below in order. Most charges are identified by step three, and almost all by step six. Disputing comes last, because a chargeback filed against a charge you actually made can be reversed and can get your card flagged.

1. Read the whole line, not just the first word

A descriptor has parts. A prefix such as SQ*, TST*, PAYPAL *, OPOS or SUMUP* names the payment processor or the bank's transaction type — not the seller. The merchant name follows it, often as a legal name ("Runfeng Tech LLC" rather than the app you downloaded). Many lines end with a phone number, a city and state or country, or a web address. Each of those is a clue, and the city in particular is usually the merchant's billing address, not where you were.

Our charge-code guides explain the common prefixes one by one.

2. Search the exact text from the statement

Type the line exactly as it appears — prefix, asterisks and all — into the WhoBilled.Me search box. Our database is built from real statement descriptors, so the odd-looking string is exactly what it is indexed by. If the exact line does not match, search the merchant-name portion on its own, then the phone number on its own.

3. Use the phone number and the city

If the line includes a phone number, search for it; merchants that print a number on their descriptor generally want you to call it before you call your bank, and the number is often the fastest identification of all. If it includes a city, remember that it is where the merchant is registered, so a charge "in" Verdun QC, San Jose CA or Luxembourg does not mean anyone used your card there.

4. Check the date, the amount and pending status

A pending charge can post under a different name and amount than it started with: restaurants add the tip, hotels and fuel pumps replace a hold with the real total, and grocery deliveries settle at the final weight. Look at charges from one to five days before the posting date. Odd amounts such as $1.00 or $0.00 are usually card-verification holds that disappear on their own.

5. Ask everyone who uses the card, and check your subscriptions

A large share of "unknown" charges are made by a partner, a child on a family plan, or a device with a saved card. Check the subscription lists in your Apple, Google, Amazon and PayPal accounts — free trials that converted, annual renewals, and app-store purchases under a developer's company name are the most common surprises.

6. Look in the merchant's own records

Amazon's Your Orders, PayPal's Activity, Apple's purchase history and Google Pay's transaction list all show the exact amount and date; matching the amount there ends most investigations. If the descriptor names a company you do not know, search the company name with the word "charge" — you will often find a page like ours explaining which app or brand bills under it.

7. Call your bank — they can see more than you can

Your card issuer receives the full merchant record for every transaction, including the merchant category and the merchant's registered details, and can usually name the business over the phone. Ask them to identify it before you ask them to dispute it.

8. Dispute only once you have ruled the charge out

If nobody on the card recognises the charge, the merchant cannot be reached, and it does not match any subscription or order, then dispute it. In the United States, credit-card billing-error rights generally run for 60 days from the statement date, and card-network rules allow longer for many dispute types, but the sooner you raise it the simpler it is. If the card details have clearly been stolen, ask the bank to cancel the card at the same time.

Common questions

Because the descriptor carries the merchant's legal or processing name, not its brand. Apps bill under their developer's company, restaurants under their point-of-sale provider, small shops under their card-reader provider, and online stores under a parent company or a payments subsidiary.

Usually not. The city on a descriptor is the merchant's registered billing location. A charge showing a distant city becomes suspicious only when the merchant, amount and date are also unexplained.

It depends on your card type, your country and the reason. In the US, credit-card billing-error protections generally run for 60 days from the statement date, and card networks allow up to 120 days for many dispute reasons. Debit-card protections are narrower and time-sensitive, so raise a suspected debit-card fraud immediately.

It can tell you which merchant uses the descriptor and how many other cardholders are searching the same line. A sudden surge of people searching one descriptor is a strong signal that something is confusing or wrong with it — WhoBilled.Me publishes those as confusion events — but whether your specific charge is legitimate still depends on whether you or someone on your card made the purchase.

More guides: OPOS · BKG* · PAYPAL * · SQ* · TST* · MB* · UBR* · DD * · IC* · SUMUP* ·