Honey, a popular browser extension promoted by YouTubers and content creators like MrBeast recently found itself at the center of a major controversy after a YouTube creator accused the company of defrauding customers and influencers.
On December 21, 2024, MegaLag, a New Zealand-based YouTuber known for investigating tech companies and products posted a video titled “Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam” where he alleged Honey of affiliate link hijacking, limiting coupon options and misleading advertisements. If you are curious about the buzz surrounding the Honey scam, here’s a quick breakdown of what’s happening.
Launched in 2012, Honey is a free-to-use browser extension that helps users find the “internet’s best coupons” on more than 30,000 websites. The extension searches for the best available coupons, eliminating the need to manually apply every coupon to see which one saves you the most money and automatically applies it when you are checking out. Users also have the option to add an item to a “Droplist”, which is a wishlist of sorts and get notified when the extension detects a price drop.
In 2020, PayPal acquired Honey for approximately $4 billion, and since then, the browser extension has grown significantly. The extension also encourages users to use Honey by offering PayPal Rewards, cashback and gift cards.
In the first video of a three-part series, MegaLag accused Honey of intercepting affiliate links used by influencers by replacing their tracking cookie with its own, stealing a sizeable portion of the commission earned by influencers from sales that originated from their promotion.
To give you a quick recap, affiliate commission is the revenue earned by a content creator or influencer when one of their subscriber or followers buys a product using their link. He also claimed that Honey does this even if it does not find a working discount coupon.
For example, when a creator earned a $35 commission from a NordVPN subscription, it was allegedly redirected to Honey, with the user getting a mere $0.89 cash back. In response to the claim, Honey said that they follow industry standards like “last-click attribution”, which redirects users to the best available deal instead of referring to affiliate links.
This way, MegaLag says Honey stole millions of dollars from popular influencers and content creators like Linus Tech Tips, MKBHD, MrBeast, MrWhoseTheBoss, PewDiePie and others.
The YouTuber also said that Honey’s unique selling point is that it finds the “best available coupon codes”, but during the investigation, he found out that Honey was actually prioritising coupons provided by the partner stores and ignoring better deals which users may avail elsewhere.
By partnering with stores, MegaLag says Honey has complete control over which coupons are displayed to the users. What it means is that Honey may intentionally hide coupons that offer more discounts, thereby not giving the user the best available deal.
When we dug into Honey’s terms of use agreement, the company says they might be able to “find you the best available discounts and coupons and to identify low prices, we may not always find you the best deal.” PayPal also states it “does not promise or guarantee that the product details, prices, coupon availability or other service terms, rates or rewards offered by any particular advertiser or other third party.”
At the time of writing, it is unclear when the next video will be released, but at the end of the first video, MegaLag teased the second part saying that he came across inconsistencies that “didn’t add up with everything else I had discovered.” The YouTuber went on to say that during his investigation, he “uncovered an even darker side to PayPal’s scam, one that targeted an entirely new victim.
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Anurag Chawake is a Senior Sub-Editor at indianexpress.com. His fascination with technology and computers goes back to the days of Windows 98. Since then, he has been tinkering with various operating systems, mobile phones, and other things. Anurag usually writes on a wide range of topics including Android, gaming, and PC hardware among other things related to consumer tech. His Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn user name is antechx. … Read More
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