A charge starting with SPO* on your statement

SPO* means you paid a restaurant, bar or cafe that takes cards through SpotOn, a US restaurant payment company. The words after SPO* are the restaurant’s name with the spaces taken out. Refunds come from the restaurant.¹²

The short answer

Read the name after SPO* out loud with spaces put back: SPO*BULLONTHEBEACH-94THST is Bull on the Beach, 94th Street.²³ Think back over meals, drinks, takeaway and online food orders around that date. If it is a place you have eaten at for years, it may simply have changed payment company, and the line changed with it.

If you searched “SPO charge”, you may have found pages about a fee in securities lending.⁹ That is a different thing. SPO* with a restaurant name after it is a card payment.

How we know SPO* is SpotOn

SpotOn does not publish a page saying what SPO stands for. Three things point to it:

SpotOn’s processing terms for the businesses it signs up say: "The descriptor field for each sales transaction must include the name of both SpotOn and Client, however SpotOn may elect to abbreviate its name at SpotOn’s sole discretion." The descriptor is the name that prints on your statement.¹
The restaurants on SPO* lines take online orders on SpotOn’s own ordering site. Bull on the Beach (94th St, Ocean City) and six Pizza King branches in Delaware each have a page on order.spoton.com, and both show up as SPO* lines in Delaware’s card data.²³⁴
Almost every SPO* line is a restaurant: 263 of the 268 lines in Delaware’s data are filed as restaurants, and the rest are bakeries, fast food and a bar.²

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 268 lines starting SPO*, under 97 different names. The first is from 19 April 2024; there were 30 that year, 112 in 2025, and 126 in 2026 up to late August.²

In all but one line the spaces are gone; dashes and apostrophes stay. No line is longer than 25 characters, which leaves 21 for the name, and 94 lines stop at exactly 25. Long names lose their ends:²

SPO* lines from Delaware’s card data, 2024–2026, each exactly 25 characters
What the statement said	Read with spaces, and what was cut off
`SPO*BULLONTHEBEACH-94THST`	Bull on the Beach - 94th St. Nothing cut; it just fits
`SPO*MANAYUNKBREWINGCOMPAN`	Manayunk Brewing Compan(y)
`SPO*THEGREATMACHIPONGOCLA`	The Great Machipongo Cla(m Shack): the words that say it is a seafood place are gone
`SPO*LIQUIDASSETS-OCEANCIT`	Liquid Assets - Ocean Cit(y)
`SPO*THESTILLERY-WESTMINST`	The Stillery - Westminst(er); the same restaurant also appears as `-DOWNTOWN`
`SPO*279SOCIALKITCHENANDCR`	279 Social Kitchen and Cr…: the name starts with a number

Not every bank prints the asterisk or the capitals. A Missouri school district’s card report shows Spo*011picklemansgourmet for a $379.42 team meal in November 2025, and a South Carolina county’s report shows SPO STACKSKITCHEN, with a space and no asterisk, for $311.60 in February 2026.⁵⁶

A place you know, under a new name

The same card data shows restaurants whose line changed when their payment company changed.²

Bull on the Beach, 94th St, Ocean City, was BULL ON THE BEACH - 94TH from 2018 to November 2024, and SPO*BULLONTHEBEACH-94THST from March 2025.
Pizza King in Delaware was PIZZA KING - BRIDGEVILLE, PIZZA KING DE GEORGETOWN and so on up to mid-2024, then PY *PIZZA KING DE GEORGET and similar from August 2024 to August 2025, and SPO*PIZZAKING-GEORGETOWN and similar from September 2025.
Cafe Beignet was CAFE BEIGNET - CANAL in 2022 and SPO*CAFEBEIGNET-CANAL from April 2024.

So an SPO* line with a familiar name squashed together is usually a regular place, not a new one.

How to find what it was

Put the spaces back Split the letters into words: HUMMINGBIRDISLANDCUIS reads as Hummingbird Island Cuis…, most likely "cuisine". Text after a dash is usually the branch or the town.
Search the first words with “restaurant” and the town If the name ends in the middle of a word, search what you have. A number at the start, like 279 or 322, is often part of the name.
Check your email for a receipt or an online order Restaurants on SpotOn take online orders on order.spoton.com.³⁴ Search your email for the restaurant’s name and for the exact amount (for example 379.42).
Ask the restaurant for a refund, and ask soon SpotOn’s help page tells restaurants they can refund "any credit card order up to 45 days from the original transaction date" from their dashboard, only back to the card you paid with, and that the refund takes "up to 7–10 business days" to appear on your statement.⁷ If the restaurant says the payment is too old, the same page says that for older orders SpotOn Support "can submit a refund rekey request for eligible transactions within 1 year of the authorization date". Ask the restaurant to contact SpotOn Support about it.
If you cannot place it, or the restaurant will not fix it, go to your bank We searched SpotOn’s help centre on 29 September 2026 and found no page written for people who were charged; it is written for the restaurants. Bring your bank the statement line exactly as printed, the date and the amount, and what you already tried. Ask what its deadline is for disputing a charge. It depends on the bank, the card network and the reason, and missing it can end your options.

Several pending SPO* charges from one night out

Bars and restaurants on SpotOn can open a tab by holding an amount on your card. SpotOn tells them that each hold "will show up as a pending transaction" in your banking app "for a few days until consolidated into a final posted transaction with tip included".⁸ With one setting turned on, the card is held again each time the tab grows, so one tab can leave several pending lines. SpotOn’s page for that setting says they "typically drop off within 2–3 business days, depending on the guest's financial institution."¹⁰

The final amount, with the tip, is the one that posts. If more than one SPO* charge for the same night has posted, they are not holds: ask the restaurant what each one was for, and for a refund if one is a duplicate.

A refund shows as its own line with a minus sign and the same name, for example SPO*HUMMINGBIRDISLANDCUIS for −$40.00 in Delaware’s data in May 2026.²

Is this fraud?

Usually not. In Delaware’s data the SPO* lines are restaurants, and many are places that used to appear under their plain name.² A line you do not recognise is most often a restaurant name you cannot read with the spaces missing, or a place that changed payment company.

But an SPO* prefix does not make a charge genuine. If you have been through the steps above and still cannot place it, treat it as unauthorized: call your bank, ask for a new card, and dispute it.

Why this page is on a site about held money

The restaurants behind SPO* lines are paid by SpotOn, and a processor can hold that money back. SpotOn’s processing terms name Worldpay as the processor behind it.¹ The incident record has no SpotOn holds yet. If your line starts TST*, that one is Toast, another restaurant system; SQ * is Square; FSP* is Fullsteam; CTLP* is a snack or drink machine. Other lines are in the table of statement names.

Sources

SpotOn Transact, LLC, "Processing Terms and Conditions" (marked "Draft 1.27.25"), section 5, "Transaction Processing", and section 1, "Processor". spoton.com/pdf/sma.pdf. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.
State of Delaware Open Data, State Employee Credit Card Transactions, fields "merchant", "trans_dt", "cat_descr" and "merchandise_amt". Lines starting SPO*. Queried and counted on 29 September 2026, with the earlier names of the same restaurants found by searching the merchant field. Delaware writes "&" as " And "; we counted lengths with it put back.
SpotOn Order, "Order from Bull on the Beach - 94th St", Ocean City, MD. order.spoton.com. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 2 April 2025.
SpotOn Order, "Order from Pizza King (Bridgeville)", and the Delmar, Georgetown, Harrington, Laurel and Millsboro pages of the same restaurant. order.spoton.com. Read on 29 September 2026.
Lee’s Summit R-7 School District (Missouri), purchasing card board report, November 2025, line dated 16 November 2025. PDF on BoardDocs. Read on 29 September 2026.
Lancaster County, South Carolina, "Purchasing Card Transactions February 1, 2026", line dated 12 February 2026. lancastercountysc.gov. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.
SpotOn Help, "Dashboard Refunds | SpotOn Express", "Frequently Asked Questions", last edited 14 September 2026. help.spoton.com. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.
SpotOn Help, "Start a Tab FAQs | SpotOn Restaurant FOH", last edited 14 August 2026. help.spoton.com. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.
Eric Dontigney, "What Does "SPO Charge" Stand For?", Chron Small Business. smallbusiness.chron.com. Read on 29 September 2026.
SpotOn Help, "Start a Tab | SpotOn Restaurant FOH (RPOS) (TSYS Only)", questions and answers, last edited 24 September 2026. help.spoton.com. Read on 29 September 2026. Archived copy of 29 September 2026.

Every factual claim on this page is sourced below. Last verified against primary sources on 29 September 2026.