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The texts, calls and WhatsApp messages never stop.
"Point me in the direction of what dollar amount you need, and we'll get it priced out and funded today!"
It's Bella, it's Jake, it's Zevi — strangers offering quick cash to help Joshua Esnard's small business in North Carolina. How does $350,000 sound? Or $768,000 and up to $900,000? Approval in an hour, they say, money in a day.
"No gimmicks, Joshua." "No hidden fees, No BS."
Exceedingly urgent pitches have flooded small-business owners' inboxes since the middle of last year, when many of them scrounged for money to pay unexpected tariff bills.
The same number calls three times in a row. When Esnard listens to music on his phone, the constant pings make it sound like a skipping CD. He installed a spam-call blocking app. His father started getting the pitches.
"How many times do I need to text before we make this happen? I'm ready to deliver funding now."
"Are you ignoring me ???"
For importers like Esnard, President Trump's global tariffs triggered an existential emergency. Their goods from suppliers in China, France or Vietnam were landing in ports of Los Angeles, Houston, New York and New Jersey. But physically claiming these products suddenly required instant cash, tens of thousands of unbudgeted dollars.
Some turned to a shady, largely unregulated corner of the financial world. This same industry had gone after struggling music venues during pandemic lockdowns and shops during the Great Recession. It offers lifelines that can turn into trip wires — now to a new market of desperate business owners.
It started with a bad haircut
Esnard was 13 when he took a pair of scissors to a thick, see-through plastic folder and carved a stencil that would guide first his DIY haircut and, then, his path in life.
Esnard's parents — academics originally from St. Lucia — had moved the family to upstate New York to teach at Cornell University. Good barbers weren't near his house. Regardless, his dad was not about to pay for one: A man who'd fashioned his own toys as a kid and approached home repairs with MacGyver confidence could certainly buzz his son's hair himself.
"And I'm just like, man, I can't do this," Esnard says. "I got my T.J.Maxx clothes, the platinum FUBU. I'm ready to go talk to the girls. But I got this buzz cut. So I'm like, I want a fade and an edge-up."
He tried winging it himself in the bathroom mirror but jacked up his hairline. So Esnard opened his "inventor book" — as this MacGyver apple sure fell close to the tree — and sketched in orange and blue ink a flat tool with angles and curves. He would hold it as a template against his head to guide the clippers for sharp lines.
Many hair trims later — his own, friends' and roommates' — this "Cut Buddy" became Esnard's first patent of seven. Sales launched in 2016, with Esnard thinking the side gig would help pay off his car. His investors were his parents and grandmother, at $1,000 each. Within weeks, the tool went viral thanks to a plug by YouTuber Nick Wavy. Esnard charged $9,000 to his personal credit card for a rush of factory orders.
Boldly reaching for a literal star, Esnard also fired off his pitch to billionaire investor Mark Cuban, who famously reads his own emails. Cuban didn't reply. But the universe works in serendipitous ways. The email that did come was an invite from Shark Tank, with Cuban on the dais. Esnard left the taping with a handshake deal with his FUBU-founder idol, Daymond John.
In the show footage, the camera zooms in on a teardrop streaking Esnard's cheek as he speaks of wanting to do good by his soon-to-be-born first child. Esnard laughs about it now, saying he has gone from crying on TV about being a dad to crying on a Zoom about high-cost borrowing through merchant cash advances.
An unregulated "deep, dark well"
A merchant cash advance, or MCA, is often compared to a payday loan for a business, because this money is quick, convenient and costly. Technically, it's not a loan but a purchase of a company's future sales. The lender gives money up front and then takes a weekly or daily cut of receipts directly from the borrower's bank account until the debt is repaid and then some.
This financing often fills a gap that banks don't, and it's chaotic. Predatory lenders and loan sharks offer merchant cash advances. So do Amazon and PayPal, with milder terms. Rohit Chopra, who investigated the industry as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau before Trump fired him and most of the agency's staff, told NPR he'd found tactics that "would make a mobster blush."
Because these cash advances aren't classified as loans, most lending laws don't apply. The lenders aren't required to be licensed. The fees they can charge have no legal cap. And because this debt is usually due within months, an equivalent annual interest rate can be astronomical. John Arensmeyer, who heads the advocacy group Small Business Majority, says the comparable annual cost averages 94%, and he has seen terms as high as 350%.
No researcher seems to have a firm grasp on how big the industry is. Merchant cash advances totaled just under $9 billion in 2014, federal investigators estimated. Five years later, they had ballooned to almost $20 billion. And that's before the COVID-19 pandemic and tariffs roiled companies' cash flows, creating even more demand for quick credit. A business that takes out one MCA tends to not stop at one, borrowing more to repay the original lender.
"This is a deep, dark well," says debt relief lawyer Ken Dramer. "As far as you want to dive into it, it just keeps getting uglier."
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When tariffs cost more than the product
Now a decade old, The Cut Buddy turns $6 million in revenue a year. The company sells two dozen grooming items, including clippers, brushes and shaving cream. Many are found at Walmart, Target, Amazon and CVS. The "hero product" — the top moneymaker and, Esnard says, "what's keeping us employed right now" — is the Bald Buddy, an ergonomic shaver that retails for $38 to $60. It's made in China, as is almost everything from this brand.
Last year was set to be The Cut Buddy's best one yet.
Esnard was expanding his contracts with big-box stores. And he'd lined up funding to step up factory orders. In 2024, when he couldn't afford to manufacture fast enough, Walmart had docked his product from 1,500 stores. In 2025, The Cut Buddy was back.
And then came the tariffs. Trump went after Chinese imports with exceptional focus, ratcheting levies several times. The import tax briefly peaked at 145% and still averages 45%. Esnard disassembled the Bald Buddy to count the parts that he could, hypothetically, source in the U.S. instead of China. He found two out of 45 — and the device's price would double.
The Cut Buddy's tariff bills became erratic and exorbitant. One day in May, Esnard paid a duty of $4,636 on a shipment of replacement shaver heads worth $3,040.
He left some goods lingering at customs; storage fees escalated quickly. He thought about holding his products abroad, but for how long? Stores demand stocked shelves. And online shoppers, unable to get The Cut Buddy's replacement heads, might switch brands altogether.
"You're stuck in this situation when you're desperate, and customs has your product at the dock, and you've got to deliver it to Walmart, Target or whatever," Esnard says. "Because if you don't deliver it to these retailers, they drop your product." Paying the tariff is the one way forward. "So where do you get the money from?" he says. "You get it from the mob, and that's the MCA."
A fast fix where banks stay away
Over the years, to keep The Cut Buddy going, Esnard has tapped his home equity and personal savings. As the company grew, its biggest loans came from a nonprofit that supports businesses from underinvested communities — which Esnard paid back by early 2025 — and the gold standard of lending, the U.S. Small Business Administration.
A bank was never really an option.
"As we've seen the largest banks in the country gobble up local banks, many small businesses cannot get the time of day from those financial supermarkets," says Chopra, the former federal financial watchdog. The U.S. still has far more banks than any other country, but their number is now a third of what it was in 1980.
About half of U.S. small businesses at some point need to borrow money, says Arensmeyer of Small Business Majority, but nearly two-thirds of them get turned down by traditional lenders. The odds are even lower for historically underbanked communities, including immigrant entrepreneurs.
By contrast, nine out of 10 businesses will get approved for a merchant cash advance, Arensmeyer says.
Some of the MCA lenders are licensed and publicly funded by Wall Street. Others are bankrolled by wealthy families or networks of private investors. They take big risks for big rewards — and they move fast. Unlike banks, they don't spend weeks scrutinizing troves of financial records. A quick check of your receipts, and the funds get on their way.
"If we reach an agreement I'll have you funded within hours. Send me the last 4 months of statements."
The industry also markets relentlessly. Virginia business owner Sarah Wells, who manufactures handbags and accessories, gets five calls and texts a day offering hundreds of thousands of dollars within a day. Richard Brown, who imports sneaker-care products for his Ohio business, Proof Culture, has fielded over a hundred emailed pitches in a matter of weeks.
"If I were to outperform the chumps and email you the best funding offer, would you at least entertain it?"
It's Josh, it's Harper, it's Camilla — "circling back from the funding approval unit." A search of public records shows that some of the messengers are real people from real firms. Others are linked to unregistered entities or websites with stock photos for "team members." NPR left voice and text messages for lenders who'd pitched Esnard. None responded, except for one who replied only, "How did you get my information?"
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However shady the source, fast access to cash is enticing in a crisis.
The Cut Buddy's tariff bills stacked to roughly $800,000 last year — more than five times what Esnard would normally budget. He covered that tab with three merchant cash advances.
Their sum ran $950,000. With the fees, Esnard's total debt topped $1.2 million.
"My dad told me, when we moved to the United States, 'Don't ever owe anybody,'" Esnard says. He then leans forward, throws his hands up and flashes a grin. "Well, I messed up, Dad!"
Searching for shelter in a "zombie attack"
The irony is that 2025 was, in fact, The Cut Buddy's best year by revenue.
But all the profits were gobbled up, either by the tariffs or the debt payments needed to cover them.
Week after week, Esnard's three MCA lenders each took a cut from the company's sales. One week, they withdrew $9,286, $7,381 and $13,500. To stay afloat, Esnard exhausted his personal credit limit. He fired The Cut Buddy's consultants who'd helped run the website and advertising. He paused donations of clippers and grooming tools to veterans, which broke his team's hearts. This January, Esnard skipped his own paycheck.
At one point, he appealed to the Small Business Administration, or SBA, hoping to refinance his debt. But last year, the agency stopped accepting such applications, determining merchant cash advances to be a red flag on a business record.
"I look at it as like a zombie attack," Esnard says. "These zombies are the MCAs, calling you and harassing you, trying to give you money in 24 hours with a crazy fee. And then you're running for help to the SBA, which is the shelter, and they just close the door on you, because they think you may have gotten bit by these zombies."
In recent years, states have waded in. Several, including Texas and Virginia, have required MCA lenders to register with the state and give borrowers clearer disclosures of terms. California gave its financial watchdog agency the power to punish abuses. New York has prosecuted abusive lenders, and lawmakers there are weighing a law to reclassify some cash advances as loans.
Some industry players have pushed to weed out the bad apples, too. For example, the Small Business Finance Association, whose Wall Street-funded members offer merchant cash advances along with other types of financing, wants regulators to require that lenders be licensed.
"There's bad actors in our space for sure. There's bad doughnut makers. There's bad bankers. There's bad players in every industry," says the group's CEO, Steve Denis. He acknowledges that some firms push predatory funding with forceful marketing. "We're really relying on the regulators and policymakers to help us really clean up our industry," he says.
In 2023, the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Chopra tried to require MCA lenders to collect and report data about small-business borrowers. But in November, after Trump's shake-up, the agency revised those lending rules to exclude merchant cash advances. Regulators, who didn't respond to NPR, wrote that MCAs are "structured differently," don't use "traditional lending concepts like 'interest rate'" and have not been fully regulated by states yet.
A way out
In the lowest moments, Esnard thinks back to a message that altered his view of his job.
"My business blew up when a disabled veteran sent an email saying, 'I take medication and my hands shake, and because of your product, I could steady my hand and I could cut my hair perfectly,'" Esnard says. "That was the first time I realized, wow, this wasn't about making money. This was actually helping people."
He outfitted his hair clippers with a curvy, joystick-style swiveling handle that's easier for someone with limited dexterity or vision. He made the device so quiet that it has appealed to parents of children sensitive to sound.
Today, Esnard's office near the Raleigh-Durham airport is full of 3D-printed prototypes and patents, his own and his mentees'. His 8-year-old son — who now has a 4-year-old sister — recently won his way to a state science fair. The Dremel carving tool they'd used for the project now sits on Esnard's testing table next to disassembled clippers for a new invention in progress.
"This is my favorite area," Esnard says, turning two steel clipper blades in his hands. But he's not here enough, "because I'm more spending time looking at profit-and-loss statements and figuring out if I can afford the loans."
He reached out to the rescue squad that has backed him before: his past lender, the Business Consortium Fund, a nonprofit that invests in underfunded businesses. Esnard told a committee of entrepreneurs and corporate executives that he had nowhere left to go. His business was growing. He'd paid off their past loans on time. Might they consider topping out their usual lending limits?
The group agreed to refinance Esnard's merchant cash advances, turning his debt into a traditional five-year loan with a manageable interest rate. The fund's CEO says Esnard had proved himself an entrepreneur with grit and gumption. And Esnard says he feels like he has won the lottery.
But on the day the deal closed last week, Esnard sounded less jubilant and more exhausted. He's relieved to be free of the MCAs, he says. But the debt remains, and the hustle to survive continues.
NPR's Greta Pittenger contributed to this report. Graphics by Alyson Hurt.
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