A charge from OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR on your statement

OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR is OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT, charging for a paid ChatGPT plan bought on chatgpt.com. It renews by itself every billing period until someone cancels it.³ Until the middle of May 2024 the same charge showed up as CHATGPT SUBSCRIPTION.⁸

What it looks like on a real statement

OpenAI’s help pages do not say what its charges look like on a 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 3 October 2026 it had 533 lines from OpenAI, from 15 October 2023 to 26 August 2026, bought by state departments, school districts and charter schools.⁸

The change of name happened between one month’s charge and the next. In the data, four school offices paid $20 under CHATGPT SUBSCRIPTION in April or early May 2024 and $20 under OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR about a month later: Red Clay on 22 April and 22 May, Thomas A. Edison Charter School on 30 April and 31 May, Appoquinimink on 6 May and 6 June, Christina on 12 May and 12 June.⁸ So if you remember paying "ChatGPT Subscription" and now see "OpenAI", it can be the same plan. A ChatGPT user who reported an unwanted charge in October 2024 noticed the same thing: their own subscription the year before had appeared as "Chatgpt Subscription", the new charges as "Openai *chatgpt Subscr".⁵

Your bank may add more to the line. One cardholder posted OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR with the address 548 Market Street, PMB 97273, San Francisco, 94104-5401; another, whose Vietnamese bank charged 522,500 dong, posted Retail_USA_+14158799686_OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR.⁵⁶ The line on its own does not tell you which plan was bought, or by whom. The Delaware data shows posted charges on one set of cards.

Why it came twice

A ChatGPT plan can be bought in three places: on chatgpt.com, in Apple’s App Store, or in Google Play. Each one bills separately, and OpenAI says that if you start a new subscription on one before cancelling the old one on another, "you can end up paying for more than one subscription at the same time". Only the chatgpt.com purchase is billed by OpenAI directly; the others come from Apple or Google. OpenAI also warns that an Apple subscription whose payment failed is not cancelled, and Apple may later renew it with a new card even after you have subscribed on the web.⁴

Having two subscriptions does not by itself get you a refund: OpenAI says "Having two separately purchased subscriptions does not automatically qualify you for a refund", while "A verified duplicate billing error can be reviewed for a correction".⁴

How to find it and stop it

1. Find the account Search your email, including spam, for "OpenAI" and "ChatGPT" and for the exact amount. A family member, a student or a colleague may have used your card. If your receipt or your phone’s subscription list shows the plan was bought through Apple or Google, the charge would come from Apple or Google, not from OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR.³
2. Cancel it Sign in to ChatGPT, open your account menu, select Settings, then Billing, and under Cancel plan select Cancel. Do it at least 24 hours before the next billing date; the paid features stay until the end of the period. Uninstalling the app does not cancel anything. If you can no longer use the account’s email address, OpenAI Support can cancel it if you give the account email, the last four digits of the card and the date of the latest payment.³
3. Ask for the refund while signed in to that account Cancelling "does not automatically refund previous charges". To ask, sign in to the account that was charged, open OpenAI’s Help Center and use the chat at the bottom right. OpenAI says accidental purchases are "generally eligible" if you contact it within 14 days of the charge, and that an approved refund is processed within 5–7 business days. In the EU, the UK and Turkey you can get a prorated refund if you cancel within 14 days of purchase.²³
4. If nobody you know has the account, go to your bank Ask your bank to cancel the card and dispute the charge, and ask what its deadline is. It depends on the bank, the card network and the reason, and missing it can end your options. Then tell OpenAI too, as described below.

If you never had a ChatGPT account

OpenAI’s page for unauthorized charges says to contact it through the chat on its help site, where you will be asked for "the date(s), amount(s), and card information", and recommends "contacting your bank immediately".¹ Its refund page is written for someone who can sign in to the charged account.²

Three people who said the card was used without them wrote on OpenAI’s own community forum. These are their accounts, not our findings:

• September 2024: a user said their card was charged twice for $20 for ChatGPT Plus, with a third attempt declined, though they had "never even linked my card to ChatGPT or OpenAI". They disputed the charges with their bank and froze the card. Other users replied in the same thread through October 2025 with the same story.⁵
• June 2026: a user in Vietnam reported a 522,500 dong charge and said no account of theirs was linked to that card. An OpenAI Support account in the thread asked for a support case number and wrote: "I wasn’t able to locate a matching record using the card ending you shared".⁶
• September 2026: a user said the card was charged $118 and $177 by a merchant shown as plain OPENAI, with three more attempts that failed, and that OpenAI Support asked for an invoice or Order ID, which the user could not give because the purchases were not in any account they could see. The next day the user wrote that Support had said the transactions "cannot be located without an Order ID".⁷

None of the three threads shows a refund from OpenAI. That is why the bank comes first: it can act on the card without an OpenAI account, an invoice or a case number.

Is this a scam?

The name is real: OPENAI *CHATGPT SUBSCR is how OpenAI’s ChatGPT plans appear on statements, and the Delaware data shows hundreds of ordinary renewals under it.⁸ That does not make every such charge wanted. A stolen card can buy a ChatGPT plan as easily as anything else, and the forum threads above describe exactly that. If no account anyone you know can sign in to has the charge, it is not a renewal you forgot, and it belongs with your bank.

Why this page is on a site about held money

This site records payment companies that hold back money that belongs to someone else. OpenAI is not in the incident record; this page is here so that people searching for a name on a statement find the answer. Other monthly plans that renew by themselves include SMK*SURVEYMONKEY and STK*SHUTTERSTOCK; software sold for another company often shows up as PADDLE.NET or FS * or FSPRG. Other lines are in the table of statement names.

Sources

1. OpenAI Help Center, "Unauthorized ChatGPT or API Credit Purchase Charges: How to Request a Refund". help.openai.com. The help centre turns away automated readers, so we read it in the web archive’s copy of 23 July 2026, on 3 October 2026. Archived copy of 23 July 2026.
2. OpenAI Help Center, "How do I request a refund for my ChatGPT subscription?". help.openai.com. Read on 3 October 2026 in the web archive’s copy of 15 July 2026. Archived copy of 15 July 2026.
3. OpenAI Help Center, "Canceling your ChatGPT subscription": "Cancel a subscription purchased on chatgpt.com", "Confirm your cancellation and billing date", "Request a refund", "Can’t sign in to cancel?". help.openai.com. Read on 3 October 2026 in the web archive’s copy of 16 September 2026. Archived copy of 16 September 2026.
4. OpenAI Help Center, "How do I avoid being charged twice if I subscribe to ChatGPT on iOS, Android, and the web?": "Why duplicate subscriptions happen", "Duplicate subscriptions due to failed payments on iOS", "What to do if you were charged twice". help.openai.com. Read on 3 October 2026 in the web archive’s copy of 28 September 2026. Archived copy of 28 September 2026.
5. OpenAI Developer Community, "Unauthorized purchases of ChatGPT subscription", first post 25 September 2024, replies to 6 November 2025; the reply of 24 October 2024 compares the two statement names. community.openai.com. Read on 3 October 2026. Archived copy of 3 October 2026.
6. OpenAI Developer Community, "I suspect OpenAI compromised my Visa card information", 24–27 June 2026, with replies from the OpenAI Support account. community.openai.com. Read on 3 October 2026. Archived copy of 3 October 2026.
7. OpenAI Developer Community, "Unauthorized $295 OpenAI charges not visible in my account — possible API auto-recharge", 16–17 September 2026. community.openai.com. Read on 3 October 2026. The web archive refused to save this page that day.
8. State of Delaware Open Data, State Employee Credit Card Transactions, fields "merchant", "trans_dt", "dept_name", "div_name" and "merchandise_amt". Lines containing OPENAI or CHATGPT. Queried and counted on 3 October 2026.