Editorial Standards

Who writes this

Justin A. — Founder & Editor

Justin A. built and runs TransactionLookup.com. He created the charge-identification tool the site is built around, maintains the lookup dataset behind its research, and authored the 2026 study of the most confusing bank charges in America — an analysis of 35,171 charges people could not identify. He writes about billing descriptors and consumer dispute rights from that data. He is not a lawyer or a financial adviser, and nothing on this site is legal or financial advice.

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What this site publishes, and what it does not

TransactionLookup publishes two kinds of content: explanatory guides about how bank charges, billing descriptors and dispute rights work, and original research derived from aggregate data about charges people have looked up on this site.

We do not give financial, legal or tax advice. We explain how a process works and point to the primary source — a regulation, a card-network rule, a regulator's own guidance — so you can check it yourself and take it to your bank. Where a decision depends on your circumstances, we say so rather than guessing on your behalf.

How our guides are written

Guides are drafted with the help of large language models and then edited by a person before publication. We are stating this plainly because it is true of a large share of the web and rarely disclosed. Google's own position is that AI assistance is not itself a problem; content produced at scale with no human judgement and no added value is.

What the editing step is actually for:

• Every factual claim about a consumer right, deadline or dispute procedure is checked against the primary source and cited inline. If we cannot source a claim, it comes out.
• Claims about how a specific merchant or processor bills are checked against descriptor strings we have actually observed, not assumed from the merchant's brand name.
• Anything that reads as generic advice available on a thousand other sites is either replaced with something specific to our data or cut.
• Numbers, dates and dollar figures are checked individually. A model will produce a plausible number as readily as a correct one, which is exactly the failure mode a reader cannot detect.

Where our data comes from

People paste unfamiliar charge descriptors into this site to find out what they are. That produces a record of which charges confuse people, how often, and how confidently they can be identified automatically. As of our 2026 study that was 35,171 lookups across 33,732 distinct descriptor strings.

We publish that only in aggregate. Individual descriptor strings are screened before any of them appear publicly, because a raw descriptor can carry a name, a location or an account fragment. We never publish anything tied to an identifiable person, and we do not ask for account numbers, card numbers or login credentials to begin with.

When we cite our own data we say what the sample was and when it was taken, so a reader can judge it. Our methodology is stated on the study itself.

Sourcing

For anything touching consumer rights we cite the primary source rather than another article about it. In practice that means the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the text of Regulation E and the Fair Credit Billing Act, the Federal Trade Commission, and the published chargeback rules of the card networks.

Where we describe a bank's or a merchant's own process, we link that company's documentation. Where sources disagree — and on dispute timelines they often do, because the statutory floor and a bank's own policy are different things — we say which is which.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, we want to fix it. Email support@transactionlookup.com with the page and what is incorrect, and we will correct it or explain why we think it is right.

Substantive corrections — anything that changes the advice or a fact a reader might act on — are noted on the page itself with the date. We do not silently edit a claim we got wrong. Typographical and formatting fixes are made without a note.

Every guide carries the date it was last reviewed, not merely the date it was published, so you can see whether anyone has checked it recently.

How we make money, and what it does not buy

The site earns money three ways: a paid statement-scan product, affiliate commissions when a reader signs up with an identity-protection or subscription-management service through our links, and display advertising.

Affiliate relationships do not determine what we recommend or how a product is described, and no advertiser or affiliate partner reviews our content before publication. Every page carrying affiliate links says so, and the full list of partners is on our affiliate disclosure page.

We do not publish sponsored posts, paid guest posts, or paid links.

Contact

Corrections, questions about sourcing, or anything else about how this site is run: support@transactionlookup.com. See also our affiliate disclosure and privacy policy.