Finding out actual items bought via credit card issuer and not the store receipt?
The store keeps track of what you buy. It is all part of their big data. The knowledge of what you buy helps them project future sales. It allows them to target their marketing. But maybe even more importantly they can sell this knowledge to outside companies. They aren't going to give away that information to another company that would love to have that data, just so they could sell it. Stores use those loyalty cards to be able to link your household to those purchases. Those discounts, or free products, are what they use to entice you to give up your privacy.  The fact that in your town young adults love caramel apples, even more than the town next door, makes them confident that your town will love caramel apple scented shampoo. Thus they send you coupons when it become available. They will also sell this knowledge to the shampoo companies. Do some stores make it possible for you to download the data? Yes they do. Apple stores send all receipts via email. Kohls allows me to see detail information about my transactions on line. There must be others. I don't know if any are grocery stores. As a merchant I can tell you that the only thing the bank gets from me.  Is the total amount and a category for my business.  No detail, not ever. The stores track the individual items for inventory planning and marketing purposes. Having worked in the transaction processing business for a time (writing one), I can say with confidence that the credit/debit card companies do not receive an itemized list of the items involved in the transaction. There is usually a description field in the information transmitted to the processor, which may or may not contain useful information. But it is not big enough to contain an itemized grocery list of any size. And it is not standardized in any way that would facilitate reliable parsing. There may be an amount of metadata about the transaction that would indicate the types of products involved in the transaction, which they can also infer from the merchant reporting the transaction. There are efforts to increase the amount of data reported, but they are not widely used yet, due to the overwhelming numbers of banks that would need to be upgraded. These efforts are rolling out only in specific and limited uses where the banks involved are willing to upgrade software and equipment. For now, the best way to know what you bought is to keep your receipts from the store. Shoeboxes work great for this. So do smartphone cameras and a folder on your hard drive. There are also mobile apps that track receipts for you, and may even try to OCR the data for you.
Keeping a receipt does allow you to verify that the expected amount was charged/debited it also can help when you need to return an item.  Regarding double charging, the credit card companies look for that. If the same card is used at the same vendor for the same exact amount in a short period of time the credit card company will flag the transaction. They assume either a mistake was made, or fraud is being attempted. The most likely result is that the transaction is denied.  A dishonest vendor can write down the card number, expiration date and CVV number. Then after you leave make up a new transaction for any amount they want. You of course wouldn't have a paper receipt for this fraudulent transaction. The key is reviewing your transaction history every few days: looking for unexpected amounts, locations, or number of transactions. "It's very straightforward for an honest vendor to refund the charge, and the transaction only costs him a few pennies at most.  If you initiate a chargeback, the merchant is immediately charged an irreversible fee of about $20 simply as an administrative fee.  He'll also have to refund the charge if it's reversed.  To an honest merchant who would've happily refunded you, it's unfair and hurtful.  In any case, now that he's out-of-pocket on the administrative fee, his best bet is to fight the chargeback - since he's already paid for the privilege to fight. Also, a chargeback is a ""strike"" against the merchant.  If his chargeback rate is higher than the norm in his industry, they may raise his fees, or ban him entirely from taking Visa/MC.  For a small merchant doing a small volume, a single chargeback can have an impact on his overall chargeback rate.  The ""threshold of proof"" for a chargeback varies by patterns of fraud and the merchant's ability to recover.  If you bought something readily fungible to cash - like a gift card, casino chips, concert tickets etc., forget it.  Likewise if  you already extracted the value (last month's Netflix bill).  Credit card chargeback only withdraws a payment method.  Your bill is still due and payable. The merchant is within his rights to ""dun"" you for payment and send you to collections or court.  Most merchants don't bother, because they know it'll be a fight, an unpleasant distraction and bad for business.  But they'd be within their rights.  Working with the merchant to settle the matter is a final resolution." "* Don't underestimate the power of facial recognition wizardry. * No, you don't have to show ID to activate the cards.  But keep in mind that they know which cards were activated.  There is a paper trail.  I'm sure Amex, Visa, MC would happily deactivate the cards for them.  Target just has to report that the cards were activated using fraud/theft. * If you took advantage of this ""deal"" your best bet is to get the prepaid credit cards and spend the money asap at another store (walmart) before they are deactivated.   * If indeed this legally is considered fraud, and they go after you for it, you could end up in a giant heap of trouble as many laws have been broken.  And, if you use any of the ""fraudulent"" CC's to make online purchases from a company in another state you could face even more federal charges." In some case the customer wants the name to be cryptic or misleading. They don't want to advertise the true nature of the business they visited. In other cases the transaction may be reported through another business. A few years ago the local PTA was having a silent auction as a fundraiser. A local business allowed the PTA to use their credit card reader to process transactions over a certain amount. Of course when the credit card statement arrived it looked like you spent $500 at the florist. I have seen PayPal listed when donating to some small charities.  I have noted another case where confusion can occur. I used a debit card to buy a soda from a vending machine: the name and location were the name of the vending machine company and the location of their main office. It didn't say  soda machine city A. It said Joe's vending company city B. In most cases the business and the credit card company want to make it easy to identify the transactions to keep the cost of research and charge backs to a minimum. Also see who has the authority to delete bills or items on bills. This was a huge scam with some servers I've worked with. If you can delete an entire bill that was paid in cash then that's money in your pocket. You have paid the vendor (school?), etc, $75.75 too much, for whatever reason. They can send you back this money, or it can apply against a future bill.  This is common when I pay my credit card in full, but also have a store return. The bill can show a credit, but it will quickly get used up by new purchases. A friend of mine has two credit cards.  He has specifically arranged with the card issuers so that the billing cycles are 15 days out of sync.  He uses whichever card has more recently ended its billing cycle, which gives him the longest possible time between purchase and the due date to avoid interest. The only issue I can see is that the stranger is looking to undervalue their purchase to save money on taxes/registration (if applicable in your state). Buying items with cash such as cars, boats, etc in the used market isn't all that uncommon* - I've done it several times (though not at the 10k mark, more along about half of that). As to the counterfeit issue, there are a couple avenues you can pursue to verify the money is real: *it's the preferred means of payment advocated by some prominent personal financial folks, including Dave Ramsey To quote the answer you linked to: Perhaps the simplest way to think about this is you can only deduct an expense that you actually incur. In other words, the expense should show up on a bank or CC statement. So, if your business purchased the $1000 gift card for $800, you should see a $800 charge appearing on a business CC or bank statement. You would therefore be able to deduct the $800, but not the full $1000 of items that you purchase with it. Side Notes: "Every legitimate claim I've filed regarding fraudulent charges on my card includes signing a legal document. If your ""friend"" completes such a document and you can verify that it is untrue, he's in deeper trouble than you. Unfortunately, if he's successful in filing a claim that is later proven to be fraudulent, it puts your account in a poor status until it's fully cleared. Even then, corporate inertia may result in longer duration inaccurate information.  Once you've cleared the fraudulent claim, you'll want to contact your credit agency to ensure they are provided with correct and proper documentation." "When processing credit/debit cards there is a choice made by the company on how they want to go about doing it.  The options are Authorization/Capture and Sale. For online transactions that require the delivery of goods, companies are supposed to start by initially Authorizing the transaction.  This signals your bank to mark the funds but it does not actually transfer them.  Once the company is actually shipping the goods, they will send a Capture command that tells the bank to go ahead and transfer the funds.  There can be a time delay between the two actions.  3 days is fairly common, but longer can certainly be seen.  It normally takes a week for a gas station local to me to clear their transactions. The second one, a Sale is normally used for online transactions in which a service is immediately delivered or a Point of Sale transaction (buying something in person at a store).  This action wraps up both an Authorization and Capture into a single step. Now, not all systems have the same requirements.  It is actually fairly common for people who play online games to ""accidentally"" authorize funds to be transferred from their bank.  Processing those refunds can be fairly expensive.  However, if the company simply performs an Authorization and never issues a capture then it's as if the transaction never occurred and the costs involved to the company are much smaller (close to zero) I'd suspect they have a high degree of parents claiming their kids were never authorized to perform transactions or that fraud was involved.  If this is the case then it would be in the company's interest to authorize the transaction, apply the credits to your account then wait a few days before actually capturing the funds from the bank.   Depending upon the amount of time for the wait your bank might have silently rolled back the authorization.  When it came time for the company to capture, then they'd just reissue it as a sale. I hope that makes sense.  The point is, this is actually fairly common.  Not just for games but for a whole host of areas in which fraud might exist (like getting gas)." You will need to first try and get the seller to refund.  (Get the name of the person you talked to and a date and time). Then you can contact the bank the card was issued through and dispute the charge.  I would make sure that you retain any proof that you purchased one item and received something other than what you purchased.  The seller does have recourse if they did fulfill their side of the transaction but if they are a legitimate merchant and actually sent you the wrong product most will not bother. Can they?  Sure.    Should they?  Absolutely not.    You're exactly right that it's dishonest, but it's not like it's a crime.  Your best recourse, as is often the case, is simply to stop buying from this site, and cancel any existing orders.  Shop with companies that exhibit trustworthy behavior. "It surely doesn't HURT to keep a receipt. I tend to pile up receipts in my desk drawer, never look at them, and then every few months throw them all out. If a vendor writes a receipt by hand or if the cash register is not tied in to the credit card system, keeping a receipt could give you evidence against mistakes or fraud. Like if the vendor gives you a receipt for $10 and then sends a transaction to the credit card company for $20, you could use the receipt as evidence of the problem. But if the vendor is trying to really cheat you, the most likely thing for him to do is run the legitimate transaction through, and then some time later run a fake transaction. So say today you go to vendor X, buy something for $20, and he bills your credit card $20. Then a few days later he bills you another $100 even though you never came back to the store. Sure, you have a receipt for $20. But you don't have a receipt for the $100 because you never authorized that transaction. Your receipt proves nothing -- presumably you're not disputing the $20. If you complain to the bank or go to the police or whatever, saying, ""Hey look, I don't have a receipt for the $100"" doesn't prove anything. How do they know you didn't just throw it away? It's difficult to prove that you never had such a receipt." I think you're dancing with the line here, this question is hard to back up without opinions and could really be three different questions. I'm going to push aside the part about quality and reliability, that could be an emotional subject. So from a price standpoint, there's virtually no disagrement that it makes financial sense to buy a used car instead of a new car. The majority of new cars lose the majority of  their resale value within the first year or two. If you purchase said car after someone else has used it for the first two years, you just avoided all of that depreciation yourself, and you're still going to be purchasing a perfectly reliable car as long as you are diligent in the buying process.