The problem this site exists to solve
Banks include a merchant reference on every card transaction — but that reference is truncated to 25 characters, stripped of spaces, and frequently registered to a holding company that bears no resemblance to the brand you bought from. The result is a statement full of codes like AMZN MKTP US*2K8J9, ROADGET BUSINESS, and ADB*ADOBE INC, none of which tell you what you actually bought.
That gap causes real harm. People cancel cards over charges that turned out to be their own Spotify subscription. Others ignore genuine fraud for months because the charge looked plausibly like something they might have bought. Both mistakes come from the same place: a statement line that is unreadable by design.
How we research each charge
Every charge page on this site is researched individually rather than generated from a template. For each one we work through the same process:
- Collect the real billing strings. We gather the actual descriptors a merchant uses, including regional variants and the parent-company names that often appear instead of the brand.
- Identify the billing entity. We confirm which legal entity holds the merchant account — this is why our SHEIN page covers Roadget Business and our Tinder page covers Match Group.
- Verify against primary sources. Pricing, billing cycles, refund windows and cancellation paths are checked against the merchant's own published help documentation, not against other websites.
- Walk the cancellation path. Where we describe how to cancel, we follow the actual sequence of screens rather than paraphrasing a support article, because those paths change often and support articles lag behind.
- Re-check on a schedule. Prices and billing practices change. Each page carries the date it was last reviewed so you can judge how current it is.
Where the AI decoder fits
Two different things happen on this site, and it matters which one you're reading.
The charge pages — everything under /charges — are written and reviewed by people. The decoder on the homepage is an AI model that analyses codes we haven't written a page for yet. It's genuinely useful for unusual merchants, and it's explicit about its confidence level, but it's pattern-matching rather than verified research.
We say so rather than blurring the two, because the difference matters when you're deciding whether to trust an answer enough to act on it. If the decoder returns a low-confidence result, treat it as a starting point for your own check, not a conclusion.
Corrections
We get things wrong sometimes — a price changes, a company restructures its billing, a cancellation flow moves. If you spot something inaccurate on any page, tell us and we'll fix it. Corrections to factual errors are made directly on the page and the review date is updated.
Email decodemycharge@gmail.com with the page and what's wrong. We'd genuinely rather hear it.
What we are not
We are not a bank, a regulated financial adviser, or a fraud investigation service, and nothing on this site is financial advice. We explain what charges are and outline the rights you generally have in the UK, but we can't act on your account or tell you what to do in your specific circumstances.
If you believe you are the victim of fraud, contact your bank directly using the number on the back of your card — not a number from a website, including this one. If you've lost money to a scam, report it to Action Fraud (or Police Scotland on 101 in Scotland).
How the site is funded
DecodeMyCharge is free and always will be. There's no account, no paywall, and no upsell. The site is funded by display advertising, which is why you'll see ads on some pages.
Advertising has no influence on what we write. We don't take payment from any merchant covered on this site, we don't publish sponsored charge pages, and we don't soften a cancellation guide because a company advertises with us. If a company makes cancelling deliberately hard, our page says so.
We don't store the charge strings you type into the decoder. Full detail is in our privacy policy.