About TransactionLookup
TransactionLookup exists because bank statements are written for banks, not for the people reading them. The line on your statement is a billing descriptor — a truncated, abbreviated string produced somewhere in the payment chain — and it frequently bears no resemblance to the business you actually paid. This site tells you what those strings mean, and publishes research on which ones confuse people most.
What we do
- Identify a charge. Paste the descriptor exactly as it appears on your statement and we return the most likely merchant, the type of charge, and a confidence score — including when that confidence is low, which matters more than a confident guess.
- Scan a whole statement. Our statement scan reads an uploaded statement and flags recurring and unrecognised charges across it, rather than one line at a time.
- Help you dispute. Our dispute letter generator writes the letter, free, without the text leaving your browser.
- Explain the system. Our guides cover how descriptors are generated, what your rights actually are under US consumer-protection rules, and the deadlines that apply.
The data behind the site
Every lookup teaches us something we cannot get anywhere else: which charge descriptors send people looking for an explanation. By our 2026 study that was 35,171 lookups across 33,732 distinct descriptor strings.
The headline finding is that for roughly half of them, the merchant could not be confidently identified at all — not by us and, judging by the fact that someone typed it in here, not by the account holder either. Payment processors are the largest single cause: PayPal alone accounts for 132 distinct descriptor strings in our data, Amazon for 202. The processor's name displaces the merchant's, and the trail goes cold.
We publish this in aggregate only, and screen individual descriptor strings before any appear publicly. See our editorial standards for how the data is handled and how our guides are written and sourced.
What we do not do
We do not give financial, legal or tax advice, we do not connect to your bank, and we never ask for account numbers, card numbers or login credentials. Identifying a charge needs only the descriptor text. Read our full privacy policy for what we store and for how long.
Our identifications are best-effort and can be wrong, which is why every result carries a confidence score. Before you act on one — particularly before you dispute a charge — verify it against your own receipts and with your bank.
How the site is funded
Lookups are free. The site is funded by the paid statement scan, by affiliate commissions, and by advertising. No advertiser or affiliate partner influences what we publish or reviews it beforehand — the specifics are in our affiliate disclosure and editorial standards.
Who runs this
TransactionLookup is built and run by Justin A., who created the lookup tool, maintains the dataset behind the research, and writes the guides. Our editorial standards set out how that content is produced, sourced and corrected.
Contact
Questions, corrections, or a lookup result that gets something wrong — we want to hear about it. We typically reply within 24–48 hours.