alt Hacker NewsThat's fair and the practices here do allow for immediate chargeback in my book. My suggestion for reaching out to support comes mostly from being on the other end of chargebacks and being frustrated when that's the first/only tool people reach for.
Chargebacks don't tell the full story, telling support "Hey you told me to pay $5 to see my pictures but there were no pictures. Give me my money or I'll file a chargeback" has a better chance of making it up the chain and changing policy. A chargeback on its own could mean any number of things and it's easier for management to write it off a "just fraud" or similar.
If you just want to screw the company but potentially not encourage them to change = Immediate chargeback
If you want to try and change the company's policies = Support + Chargeback if not fixed
I'm not making a judgement call either way, I think both are acceptable in this scenario. I'm just pointing out that if change is your real desire, the support route has better odds.
Gotcha, I may have made some assumptions on how the process works. From the handful of chargeback stories I've heard from merchants, the credit card company passed along the cardholder's reasoning to the merchant when issuing the chargeback. So the merchant was able to figure out why the customer was unhappy. But that's anecdotal, I don't actually know if that's standard.