There is a particular flavor of internet villain who posts photos of himself draped over the hood of a rented Lambo while, somewhere on the other side of the planet, a 64-year-old woman is on hold with her bank trying to figure out why a company she has never heard of has charged her $43.99 for the third week in a row. He calls himself an entrepreneur. The bank calls it a chargeback. Her grandkids call it "Nana, please stop clicking on TikTok ads."

This is a post about that kind of "Entreprenuer", specifically, Jonamado Pieiga, otherwise known as @Jonamado on his social media accounts.

The playbook, in one paragraph

You see an Instagram ad. A miracle shampoo that regrows hair. A magic toothpaste that whitens teeth and presumably also pays your rent. There is a "buy one get one free" offer with a countdown timer because of course there is. You enter your card. You get a single bottle, or sometimes nothing at all. Seven days later, your bank pings you for another $44. Then another. You hunt for a cancel button. The cancel link goes to a page that says "Bad URL." You email support. Support is named Dionne and Dionne is "looking into it." Two more charges hit. You call your bank. Your bank sighs, because your bank has seen this exact movie before, starring a different company name but the same screenwriter.

The receipts: thebrytelabs.com

Pull up the Trustpilot page for Brytelabs and the reviews are less a "spectrum of customer experience" and more a Greek chorus chanting the same line. Buyers describe ordering the buy-one-get-one toothpaste deal and getting silently enrolled in a subscription nobody agreed to. They describe £43.99 charges showing up days after a £22 purchase. They describe customer support that responds only after the next shipment is "already in transit" and therefore, conveniently, non-refundable. They describe canceling, being told they were unsubscribed, and then being charged again two days later. Multiple reviewers report having to call their banks to physically block the merchant — the digital equivalent of nailing the door shut because the locksmith won't return your calls.

The kicker on the Brytelabs reviews isn't the scam. It's the toothpaste. Reviewers report it doesn't work, sometimes contains hard black flecks, and in at least one case appears to have been rebranded from a totally different product. You're being charged a luxury subscription price for what one customer described, with admirable restraint, as a $50 tube of nothing.

The receipts: theeloriabeauty.com (and eloribeauty.com, and eloriabeauty.shop, and eloriabeauty.co, and eloria.com)

Notice the enormous list of similar names. That's the tell.

The Eloria operation — a "rosemary shampoo" advertised with the legendary marketing claim that they'll pay you $20,000 if it doesn't regrow your hair — has set up shop on at least five different domain variants that I could find, each with its own Trustpilot page, each accumulating the same exact complaints. Buyers ordered one bottle. They were charged for two within a week. The cancellation link redirects to "Bad URL." Customer service emails go unanswered, or come back from someone explaining that the second order is already shipping and therefore cannot be stopped, an explanation that has the structural integrity of wet cardboard.

One reviewer noted that Trustpilot lists the company as based in Colombia while the website lists a U.S. address. Another tracked the actual product back to AliExpress, where it sells for under two dollars. The $20,000 hair-regrowth guarantee has, predictably, never been paid to anyone.

The domain-hopping is the part that should make any regulator's eye twitch. When one storefront accumulates enough one-star reviews that even the most desperate consumer would notice, the operation just spins up a new domain, slaps a slightly different logo on the same product, and starts the cycle again. It's the e-commerce equivalent of getting kicked out of one bar and crossing the street to a new bar with the same bartender.

The lifestyle dissonance

Despite running this operation, Jonamado also runs a parallel content strategy: photos of supercars he doesn’t own, in front of villas renting by the night, captioned with quotes about "mindset" and "the grind." The yacht, the watch, the caption that reads "make your dreams reality," which is interesting, because most people’s dreams aren’t tricking people into a $43.99 charge for toothpaste with black flecks in it. .

The dissonance is the point. The Lambo and the chargeback are not two separate stories. The Lambo is the chargebacks. Each rented exotic car represents some specific number of grandmothers who couldn't figure out how to cancel a subscription they never agreed to. The villa weekend is forty single mothers in three countries calling their banks. The Rolex is a woman in Manchester who didn't even get the toothpaste, just the recurring charge for the toothpaste.

What to do if this happened to you

A chargeback gets your money back. It does not shut the operation down. To actually apply pressure, you have to hit the infrastructure the scam runs on — the card networks, the storefront host, the domain registrar. None of those reports does much in isolation. Aggregate volume is what kills these operations, which is why filing in more than one place actually matters.

Here's the ladder, in the order you should climb it:

1. Chargeback through your card issuer. Fastest path. Call the number on the back of your card and dispute every unauthorized recurring charge as "subscription not authorized" or "merchant refused to cancel." Banks see this exact pattern constantly and approve quickly. Do this before fighting with customer service — chargebacks are easier when you haven't accepted a partial refund.

2. Block the merchant ID. Ask your bank to block all future charges from that merchant. This is more durable than canceling the card, since the operation can sometimes follow you to your replacement card.

3. Report to Visa or Mastercard. Use the phrase "deceptive merchant" or "unauthorized recurring billing" — that routes to the right team. Visa: usa.visa.com/support/consumer/security.html. Mastercard: mastercard.us/en-us/personal/get-support/report-fraud.html, or 1-800-MASTERCARD.

4. Report the storefront to Shopify. Both Brytelabs and Eloria are Shopify-hosted (you can confirm by viewing page source and searching for "cdn.shopify.com"). File at shopify.com/legal/report-abuse. Shopify has actually delisted subscription-trap stores when complaints stack up, and they're financially exposed to chargebacks themselves, so they care.

5. Report the domain to Namecheap. Run the domain through whois.com to confirm the registrar — many of these rotating domains are Namecheap-registered. File an abuse report at namecheap.com/legal/abuse-policies/abuse-form. Registrars will suspend domains over documented fraud patterns, and Namecheap has been notably responsive on ROSCA-related abuse reports.

6. File with the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov, and explicitly use the word "ROSCA" in your description. The federal Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act prohibits exactly this — negative-option enrollment without clear consent and easy cancellation — and the FTC has gone after major operators (Adore Me, ABCmouse, Vonage) under it. The keyword routes your complaint into the right pipeline.

7. File with your state Attorney General, especially if you're in California. The state's Automatic Renewal Law is genuinely sharp, and the California AG has been the most aggressive in the country on enforcement.

8. Leave the review. Trustpilot, BBB, Reddit, anywhere search engines will see it. The single most powerful disinfectant against an operation that survives by domain-hopping is making each new domain land on a "this is a scam" result on page one of Google.

Rented cars. Real victims. Same scam, new URL. If you got hit, file everything in the list above. The cars go back to the rental lot on Monday. The chargebacks do not.