Unknown charge on credit card: decode the name, then decide

Four things separate what you bought from what the statement prints. The first is the merchant of record. The second is truncation: the merchant name travels in a short fixed-length field, so a long registered name loses its ending and may read as a different company, or as nothing. The third is location: the city beside the name is often where the business or its gateway is registered, not where you paid, so a purchase in one city can appear against another. The fourth is timing: a card purchase is authorised when you pay and posted when the merchant settles, usually a day or two later and sometimes more, so the date on the statement may not be the date you remember.

Any one of these makes a real purchase look unfamiliar. Two together, a parent company's name cut short and posted two days late, make it look like fraud.

Statements differ by issuer, but the shapes repeat. These are generic patterns, not exact strings. The words on your statement will differ; the method is to recognise the shape and go to the record that shape points at.

If a line containing Hindustan, HPCL or a similar fragment appears, ask whether anyone who uses the card bought fuel that day or a day or two before. The amount is usually a round figure, easy to match against a fuel stop you remember. A second, small line often follows: the fuel surcharge, a percentage of the fuel amount that many cards add. On an illustrative ₹3,200 fill at 1 percent, that is ₹32. Cards that waive the surcharge usually do so only within a band of transaction amounts set in the card's terms, and the refund often arrives as its own credit a statement later.

The same holds for the other oil companies and any large business with an unfamiliar legal name. Where a registered name contains a common word like Hindustan, it may belong to a different business altogether, so a fuel purchase you cannot place on that date is not settled by the name alone.

Work through these checks in order and stop at the first one that explains the line. While you do, note the date of the alert for the charge. If the line is still unexplained after the first four checks and that alert came in more than a day or two ago, report it now and carry on decoding afterwards. A report can be closed; a missed window cannot be reopened.

One illustrative statement, with the lines the cardholder did not recognise pulled out; everything else on it was familiar. The six add up to ₹13,957.05. The order above settled five of them within minutes each, and the sixth is the reason the order exists.

Take an illustrative ₹60,000 limit with ₹21,300 already spent. A hotel blocks ₹8,000 at check-in; the final bill at checkout is ₹6,450, charged separately. Until the hold drops, ₹14,450 of the limit is tied up for one stay and the available limit shows ₹24,250. Once it drops, the available limit returns to ₹32,250, and only the ₹6,450 ever reaches the statement. Holds generally fall away when the merchant releases them or the authorisation lapses, which can take from a few days to a couple of weeks after checkout depending on the merchant and the issuer. A hold that lingers is a question for the merchant first, since only the merchant can release it early.

Currency lines look wrong for a different reason. An overseas merchant may offer to charge you in rupees instead of its own currency, which is dynamic currency conversion. The merchant's rate then sets the rupee amount, and the statement shows a foreign name with a rupee figure that matches no price you saw. In the example, $27 was charged as ₹2,380.05 at an illustrative 88.15 rupees to the dollar.

RBI's customer liability circular for unauthorised electronic banking transactions, at https://www.rbi.org.in/Scripts/NotificationUser.aspx?Id=11040, sets the windows. Where the fault lies neither with you nor the bank but elsewhere in the system, your liability is zero if you notify the bank within three working days of receiving its communication about the transaction. Report within four to seven working days and your liability per transaction is limited to the transaction value or ₹10,000, whichever is lower, on a credit card with a limit up to ₹5 lakh, and ₹25,000 on a higher limit. Beyond seven working days, the bank's board-approved policy decides. Working days exclude the day the communication arrived. Where the loss came from sharing card details or an OTP, you bear it until you report.

The ₹4,999 line in the example raised an alert on Thursday 10 September, which the cardholder ignored. The statement was generated on Tuesday 15 September, working day three. The cardholder read it on Friday 18 September, working day six, and by then the line was past the zero-liability window. The count assumes Monday to Saturday working, with Sundays and the second Saturday off and no other holiday.

Most of the work on this page is matching a line to a record you already have. Unyfy reads bank and card transaction emails and, on Android, transactional SMS, so each card alert sits in one list on the day it arrives instead of in a crowded message inbox, and the matching can start before the statement does. There is no manual entry.

What you see is each debit with the merchant behind it; a merchant database of about 10,000 entries maps UPI handles to merchant names, which helps with UPI payments made from a credit card. A debit seen through both email and SMS is counted once, so the same amount listed twice is two charges. On Pro, the Fixed Expenses Subscriptions list shows each recurring subscription with its amount, whether it is due or paid, and its past months' payments. That covers the repeat check and the same-amount-twice case in the decoding order.

Report a charge you do not recognise to your issuer, and keep an eye on the reporting clock. It never asks for your bank password or UPI PIN, and every payment is one you authorise. Install Unyfy on Android, or use the web app at app.unyfy.co.in on an iPhone.