Credit Card Statements are an Ode to Our Broken Digital Worlds

Technology is so complex that official solutions are indistinguishable from spam

Photo by Nathana Rebouças on Unsplash

Looking at my credit card statement the other day, I was struck by how many of the items on it are incomprehensible. Not scams, not hacks, but legitimate purchases indistinguishable from half-hearted phishing attempts.

“AMAZON MKTPL*5J8D931J2”, reads one. This is a payment to Amazon and I guess the next word means “marketplace”, despite the product coming directly from Amazon. The string of random letters is an ID, I assume, but not the order ID or shipping reference. I don’t know why the whole thing is in capitals, yelling that I spent £12.47. This is how transactions are displayed from the payment processing system of one of the richest companies in the world.

Some of the items on my statement begin with “SQ*”, which means the shop was using Square as their payment processor. PayPal writes their name with a star at the end. Shopify writes SP UK, without a star. SumUp adds a star but mixes things up by writing SumUp in sentence case, and the name of the company in uppercase. iZettle writes Zettle_*, the space being replaced with an underscore at some point. As far as I can tell, this means that, in 2025, there is a system somewhere in that payment chain…