Guide
What is this charge on my bank statement?
Most unrecognised charges are not fraud. They are a subscription you forgot, a free trial that quietly converted, or a company billing under a name you have never seen. Work through these in order — it takes about five minutes, and the last step is the one that stops it happening again.
1. Read the descriptor properly
The text on your statement is the billing descriptor, and it is often the parent company, the payment processor, or an abbreviation — not the brand you signed up with. A few patterns worth knowing:
- Prefixes like
SQ *,PADDLE.NET,PAYPAL *,FS *orDLOCALare payment processors. The name after the prefix is the real merchant. - APPLE.COM/BILL means it was billed through your Apple Account — which is good news, because those are all listed in one place (see step 3).
- A city or country tacked on the end is where the merchant is registered, not where you were when you paid.
- Holding companies. Plenty of apps bill under a parent name that appears nowhere in the product.
Search the exact descriptor string in quotes. If it is a subscription, someone else has already asked about it.
2. Check the amount against the calendar
Two questions identify most charges on their own:
- Has the same amount appeared before? A charge that recurs monthly or annually on roughly the same date is a subscription, not a one-off. Scroll back twelve months rather than three — annual renewals are the ones people never recognise, precisely because a year has passed.
- Is it about a month after you signed up for something? Free trials convert silently. A charge arriving 7, 14 or 30 days after you tried something is almost always that trial ending.
3. Check the four places subscriptions actually live
No single screen shows everything you pay for, which is the whole reason unrecognised charges happen. Check all four:
There is a longer walkthrough of all four in how to find subscriptions you have forgotten.
4. If it really is not yours
If the descriptor matches nothing and the amount matches nothing, treat it as fraud rather than a puzzle. Contact your bank through the number on your card or in your banking app — not a number from a search result or from the charge itself. Ask them to block the card and dispute the transaction. Card networks give you a defined window to raise a chargeback, so speed matters.
One thing worth checking first: a small charge of a pound or a dollar that disappears is usually a pre-authorisation, not a real payment — a card being tested for validity by a merchant you did use.
5. Stop the next one being a surprise
Identifying one charge is a chore you will repeat unless the list lives somewhere. The point of a tracker is that the next unfamiliar line on your statement takes ten seconds instead of ten minutes, because you already have a record of what should be there.
Outflow does this without bank linking: you can share or scan a statement or a receipt and it reads the recurring charges out of it on the device — the file is never uploaded, because there is nowhere to upload it to. What it finds, you keep; what it cannot find, you add in a few taps.
Common questions
Why does a charge show a company name I don't recognise?
Statements show the billing descriptor, which is often the parent company or the payment processor rather than the brand you signed up with. Prefixes such as SQ *, PAYPAL * or PADDLE.NET are processors — the name after the prefix is the actual merchant.
What does APPLE.COM/BILL mean on my statement?
It means the charge was billed through your Apple Account — an app, a subscription bought inside an app, iCloud storage, or an Apple service. Every one of those is listed under Settings → your name → Subscriptions, where you can also cancel it.
Is a charge I don't recognise always fraud?
No, and usually not. The most common causes are a forgotten subscription, a free trial that converted, and a merchant billing under a different trading name. Check those first, but if none of them explain it, contact your bank using the number on your card and dispute it.
How do I find a subscription that isn't in my Apple Account?
Check Google Play, PayPal's automatic payments, and the card statement itself. Anything billed directly by a merchant appears only on the statement, which is why a tracker that reads a statement finds subscriptions that no single settings screen lists.
Outflow tracks what you pay for on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Nothing leaves your device — no bank linking, no account, and Pro is a one-time purchase rather than yet another subscription.