A charge starting with IC* INSTACART on your statement

IC* INSTACART is Instacart, the grocery delivery service: either a grocery order, or the fee for an Instacart+ membership. A name after a second asterisk, such as IC* INSTACART*ALDI, is the store the groceries came from.¹²

What it looks like on a real statement

The State of Delaware publishes every purchase its employees make on state cards, with the merchant name as the bank received it. When we counted on 29 September 2026 it had 381 lines starting IC* that belong to Instacart, from school districts, charter schools, a college and a health department, running from 5 July 2022 to 14 July 2026.³

No line is longer than 22 characters, so a long store name is cut off. The shape is always IC*, a space, INSTACART, and then either nothing or an asterisk and a word. A line for one store can still read IC* INSTACART alone; the store is only named on some orders.³

Several pending charges for one order

Instacart’s own help page says it "places temporary authorization holds on your card to cover potential changes to the total due to added items, replacements, and weighted items", that the amounts "may be higher than your order total", and that you might see more than one hold on an order. A second hold appears if changes after checkout go over the first hold, or if you ordered several days ahead and the first hold ran out before delivery.¹

The holds are released by your bank "after the order delivers or cancels", and it "can take additional time for the pending charge to drop from your account." So two or three pending lines from one order, all larger than what you finally paid, are usually holds and not separate charges. The final total can also differ from what you saw at checkout: refunds for out-of-stock items, replaced items at a different price, items added later, produce that weighed differently, or a tip raised after delivery.¹

The Delaware data lists posted charges only, so it cannot show a hold. Wait until the lines have posted and then compare them with the order in your account.

How to find what it was

1. Look at the account, not the card Sign in on instacart.com and open your order history. If you have no Instacart account, search your email for “Instacart” and for the exact amount. A family member, flatmate or someone who once used your card to order groceries for you is the usual answer.
2. Check the membership Instacart says a free trial of Instacart+ turns into a paid plan at the end of the trial, and that the charge can be applied up to 6 hours before renewal. Open the menu, then Your Instacart+ membership, and you see the plan and when it renews.²
3. Cancel the membership if it is not wanted Under Manage your membership, choose Cancel membership, then Continue and Confirm cancellation. You then get a confirmation email; if it is missing, check your spam folder.²
4. Ask for the refund within the window For an annual membership, Instacart says you can cancel "within the first 5 calendar days of your paid Instacart+ membership and get a refund", but "only if you haven't placed any orders using your Instacart+ membership." After that there is no refund; you keep the free delivery until the period ends.² The same page says trial charges are "refundable per the Instacart+ Terms", which we have not read.
5. If the order was not yours, tell Instacart and the bank Instacart asks you to contact it first and says it can sort a charge "much more quickly than going through a bank dispute".¹ If the charge is fraud, do not wait on that: your bank can cancel the card at once, and an unauthorized card charge is the bank’s to dispute. Ask it for its dispute deadline. It depends on the bank, the card network and the reason, and missing it can end your options.

Is this fraud?

Usually not. In Delaware’s data almost every line is a grocery order, and the few unusual ones are memberships.³ But a familiar prefix does not make a charge genuine: a stolen card can be used on Instacart as easily as anywhere else. If the account history shows no such order and no membership, treat the charge as unauthorized, call your bank, ask for a new card, and dispute it. Expect Instacart to close the account attached to the dispute while the bank looks into it, as its page warns.¹

Why this page is on a site about held money

This site records payment companies that hold back money that belongs to someone else. Instacart is a shopping service, not a payment processor, and the incident record has no Instacart entries. The page is here so that people looking for a name on a statement can find the answer. If your line starts PAYPAL *, that one is PayPal; SQ * is Square; SP is a Shopify shop; DD *DOORDASH is DoorDash. Other lines are in the table of statement names.

Sources

1. Instacart Help Center, "Authorization holds, recurring payments, and unknown charges". instacart.com/help. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.
2. Instacart Help Center, "Manage your Instacart+ membership", sections "Membership charges" and "Cancel your membership". instacart.com/help. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.
3. State of Delaware Open Data, State Employee Credit Card Transactions, fields "merchant", "trans_dt", "cat_descr", "dept_name" and "merchandise_amt". Lines starting IC*. Queried and counted on 29 September 2026. The 4 lines IC *FREESHIPPING.COM from 2019 are a different company and are not counted.