Once upon a time in 2015 there was a black belt named Jay Queiroz. He was successful, was apparently an elite jiu jitsu practitioner, and a certified bad ass. The only problem was that the only true piece of those claims was that he had his own school. It got out and got exposed – badly.

BJJ super hero Mike Palladino rolled in to his school after finding out and did the exposing. Oh, and he recorded it for good measure.

Shortly after Jay was embarrassed by the Rafael “Formiga” Barbosa jiu jitsu black belt, Palladino released a statement on the matter.

It’s been four days since Jay Queiroz, a man posing as a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu blackbelt was exposed by my students and myself. The video has gone viral within the community, and their has been an outreach of full support from all around the world. I’ve received private messages on Facebook from practitioners in Egypt, Russia, Brazil, Australia and all across the US thanking me for exposing a fraud. While I am extremely grateful for the incredible amount of support, I was merely just doing my part in keeping the art that we all love so much – pure.

Now to cap that off Queiroz’s own website manager and former student identifying himself as Nick M. put him on blast as well.

I trained with Jay for a few months (about 3) it seemed a bit sketchy from the start I’ll admit but, I over looked it because he seemed like a nice person. During that time I got a blue belt in a few weeks witch made me completely sketched out because, from what I read it takes the best of the best a minimum of 6 months to get a blue belt and I’d say I’m just average. Too add to that he didn’t have any belt higher then purple until he ordered a black belt a while later (He claimed he left it somewhere I don’t really remember, also I think this confirms your theory that he actually may have been a purple belt).

The sketchiness of that lead to 2 of my friends leaving the gym immediately after but, no no I trusted him so I stayed a while longer and trained almost everyday for about 2 more months and it started feeling really repetitive and I felt like I’d already learned everything he had to teach. At that point summer hit and I started working full time with the combination of lack of time and repetitiveness I decided to stop going during the summer although I did plan on going back once the summer ended solely because of the fact I considered Jay a friend and I should probably support him.

After seeing this video to my disappointment the assumptions I had were confirmed. It’s pathetic that he’d lie to his students that put in countless hours helping him with his gym. What he did was low and I mean real low I understand the honor of having a belt and what it means in BJJ and he completely disrespected it. Not only that but he lied and took advantage of everyone’s trust. I decided it would be best that I delete the website I built for him because now I find it misleading (this is not an act of spite I just feel its in everyone’s best interest). The thing I don’t get is he still has people supporting him.

Then to top it all off the Chief of GFTeam Julio Cesar Pereira went right to Twitter once he found out what Queiroz was doing.

Hi, I just came to say to you that a Purple belt can’t teach a Jiu Jitsu class. You can’t use our name, of GFTeam, on this way. You are not authorized to do that.

So as you can see once it was identified that he was a fraud he got exposed quickly. The problem is that there are probably hundreds of these fake black belts out there able to operate because their school is too small to notice or care, or they don’t advertise it and it gets passed slowly by word of mouth. If you claim to be a black belt in today’s internet age then you will be fact checked by just about everyone who comes across your name. The amount of calories burned in martial arts can be quite great, but so can the scam artists.

Here was one of the warning signs that woke a sleeping jiu jitsu community dragon.

and this one…

Notice the size of the school? Just a few students there so it’s easy to understand why it took so long to be exposed.

Let this serve as a warning to you black belt impersonators. If you make the claim you better be able to back it up or become one of the biggest jokes in the jiu jitsu community. Good luck finding an instructor to achieve it legitimately after getting busted.

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