Cardholder Advisory Policy

Most charge pages on WhoBilled.me are reference records: who a descriptor belongs to and how to reach them. Occasionally a page also carries a Cardholder Advisory — an amber-marked section that appears when a descriptor is generating an unusual wave of cardholder confusion and we hold information cardholders need that the structured record cannot express. This page is the standing policy that governs every advisory we publish. It was adopted before our first advisory, and it does not bend case by case.

When an advisory is published

An advisory appears only when all three of these are true:

First-hand evidence of acute confusion
Our own measurements — search volume on this site, its velocity against the descriptor's own baseline, and cardholder behavior on the page — show an abnormal confusion event in progress. We do not publish advisories from rumor, social media, or third-party complaint volume alone.
An unidentified or unclaimed record
Advisories are for descriptors whose merchant has not claimed the record and cannot be adequately described by the record itself. A claimed, verified record answers cardholders directly — it does not need an advisory, and claiming is how one is retired.
Concrete cardholder value
The advisory must tell an affected cardholder something actionable they cannot easily learn elsewhere — for example, that a charge is billed outside a platform's payment system, so the platform's cancellation settings may not stop it.

How advisory content is sourced

Every statement in an advisory belongs to exactly one of three labeled categories, and the label is shown on the page:

Public record
Facts anyone can verify: corporate filings, registered agents, app-store listings and availability, published prices. Facts that can change are stamped with the date we checked them.
What cardholders report
Attributed accounts from cardholders — reviews, reports, and statement lines shared with us. These are presented as reports, never as our own assertions.
WhoBilled.me data
Our first-party measurements: when lookups began, their volume, and their geographic spread. We publish these as fact because we measured them.

Advisories never assert intent. Words like "scam" or "fraud" do not appear as our claims, whatever we may privately suspect — an advisory describes verifiable circumstances and attributed reports, and lets cardholders draw their own conclusions.

The merchant's right of reply

Every advisory links the merchant to a claim process where they can verify their identity, correct the record, add real support contacts and policies, and respond to what cardholders report. Claiming a record is free. When a merchant claims and verifies a record, the advisory is suppressed — the merchant's own verified information takes its place, which is a better outcome for everyone, cardholders included. Where we have any working contact channel for a merchant, we attempt to notify them at or before publication.

No payment removes an advisory. Not claiming fees, not subscriptions, not partnership — nothing. An advisory comes down when the facts change: the merchant claims and verifies the record, the confusion event ends, or we learn the advisory was wrong. There is no other path, and no one at this company can sell one.

Corrections

If anything in an advisory is inaccurate or out of date, we want to know, and we will correct it the same day it is confirmed — advisories carry their checked-as-of date precisely so staleness is visible. Use the feedback controls on the page, the claim process, or the contacts on our About page. A confirmed error is corrected in place; a materially wrong advisory is retracted, not quietly edited.

Why we publish at all

When a confusing charge hits statements at scale, cardholders search for it within hours. If no honest answer exists they are left with two options: give up, or call their bank and dispute. An accurate page — including, when warranted, an advisory — is the alternative to both. It is also, we believe, better for the payments system: confusion surfaced early is confusion that can be fixed early, by the merchant, their processor, or both. Our methodology page explains how ordinary records are built; this policy governs the rare pages that need to say more.