Honey Extension Scam
Honey, which is owned by PayPal, is a popular browser extension—with 19 million users on Chrome alone—but the shopping tool is being accused of some seriously shady practices, including keeping users away from the lowest online prices and blocking creator affiliate links to deprive them of revenue. The scandal surfaced through a comprehensive video posted by MegaLag, who calls it “the biggest influencer scam of all time” based on an investigation that’s apparently been ongoing for several years. MegaLag claims to have reviewed masses of documents, emails, and online ads in the course of the investigation, as well as having spoken to victims and personally falling foul of Honey’s methods.
Honey works by popping up an offer to find coupon codes for you while you’re checking out in an online shop. But as MegaLag notes, it frequently fails to find a code, or offers a Honey-branded one, even if a simple internet search will cover something better. The Honey website’s pitch is that it will “find every working promo code on the internet.” But according to MegaLag’s video, ignoring better deals is a feature of Honey’s partnerships with its retail clients.
MegaLag also says Honey will hijack affiliate revenue from influencers. According to MegaLag, if you click on an affiliate link from an influencer, Honey will then swap in its own tracking link when you interact with its deal pop-up at check-out. That’s regardless of whether Honey found you a coupon or not, and it results in Honey getting the credit for the sale, rather than the YouTuber or website whose link led you there.
The official response denies nothing:
Honey is free to use and provides millions of shoppers with additional savings on their purchases whenever possible. Honey helps merchants reduce cart abandonment and comparison shopping while increasing sales conversion.
Update (2025-01-02): See also: Wladimir Palant and Marques Brownlee.
Honey sponsored Mr. Beast in 3 videos, gaining a total of 140M views after spending approximately $120,000.
Update (2025-01-06): Elliot Shank:
Lawyer YouTuber is starting a class-action lawsuit against PayPal/Honey.
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I cannot believe people whose income is at least partially dependent on affiliate revenue have never even considered that of course Honey would do this. Completely crazy that this is some widespread revelation after all this time.
"I cannot believe people whose income is at least partially dependent on affiliate revenue have never even considered that of course Honey would do this."
This isn't obvious to me at all. My assumption was that they were doing market research and selling sales data, not that they were committing affiliate fraud, extorting companies into paying them money to not give users good coupons, and scamming their users by intentionally giving them bad coupons.
“This isn't obvious to me at all.”
Sure, not immediately on the surface, but if you trade in affiliate marketing, would you not do a little testing to see what an extension like this might do to your browser cookies? There are only so many theories as to how Honey could make enough money to pay all these influencers to market its free product. Affiliate marketing is easily and instantly a top three guess.
I don't know, I guess I'm stupid, but when I look at a company owned by a major payment system and think about how they make money, "fraud" is not the first thing that comes to mind.
