The FBF Motherhood charge on your statement is a billing descriptor for a purchase made through Motherhood Maternity, a maternity apparel brand that sells online and through department store partners. Before treating it as fraud, check your recent orders and ask anyone authorized to use your card. If the charge is genuinely unauthorized, contact your card issuer promptly to dispute it.
What the Descriptor Means
“FBF – MOTHERHOOD” ties back to Motherhood Maternity. The “FBF” portion is a payment-processing prefix and doesn’t correspond to a publicly identified corporate abbreviation for the brand’s parent companies. The descriptor was first cataloged on charge-identification databases in January 2022.
Depending on your bank and card network, you may see it written several ways:
- POS Debit FBF – MOTHERHOOD, POS PUR FBF – MOTHERHOOD, POS PURCHASE FBF – MOTHERHOOD, or Misc. Debit FBF – MOTHERHOOD for debit transactions
- CHKCARD FBF – MOTHERHOOD, CHECKCARD FBF – MOTHERHOOD, or Visa Check Card FBF – MOTHERHOOD MC for credit and check card transactions
- PRE-AUTH FBF – MOTHERHOOD or PENDING FBF – MOTHERHOOD for temporary holds
- POS REFUND FBF – MOTHERHOOD for a return credit
A “POS REFUND” line is money coming back to you, not a new purchase. A “PRE-AUTH” or “PENDING” entry is a temporary hold that may drop off once the transaction finalizes or is cancelled.
Check These Things Before Reporting Fraud
Match the date and amount against email confirmations or receipts for any recent maternity apparel orders. If anyone else is authorized on your card, ask whether they placed an order. The charge may line up with a purchase from the Motherhood Maternity website or from a retail partner like Macy’s, Nordstrom, or Target, where the brand’s products are sold.
One reason the descriptor can look unfamiliar even on a legitimate purchase: the brand has changed hands and shifted its operating model more than once. Motherhood Maternity was originally part of Destination Maternity Corporation, which filed Chapter 11 in October 2019. Marquee Brands acquired the intellectual property and e-commerce operations through a bankruptcy sale that closed in December 2019, and in January 2023 granted operational control to a new entity called Hatch Collective. The brand no longer runs standalone stores, so the processor name you see on your statement may not match what you’d expect from the brand name.
How to Dispute an Unauthorized Charge
If the charge is genuinely unauthorized, contact your card issuer right away. Under the Fair Credit Billing Act, your liability for unauthorized credit card charges is capped at $50, and many issuers offer zero-liability policies that waive even that amount. You have 60 days from the date the statement containing the charge was sent to you to formally dispute it.
Calling the number on the back of your card is a reasonable first step. To fully protect your rights under federal law, send a written dispute notice to your issuer’s billing inquiries address, ideally by certified mail. Once your written dispute is filed, the issuer must acknowledge it in writing within 30 days and resolve the investigation within two billing cycles, or 90 days at most. During that period, you are not required to pay the disputed amount or any related interest or fees, and the issuer cannot report you as delinquent for withholding payment on the disputed portion. You do still need to pay any undisputed balance to avoid late fees.
Debit card transactions follow slightly different rules. If your physical card wasn’t lost or stolen but unauthorized charges appear, notifying your bank within 60 days of the statement date generally preserves your protections. Banks typically have 10 business days to investigate and must issue a temporary credit if the investigation takes longer.