How Honey Stole Money from Influencers (Scam)

You probably know Honey as the browser extension that promises to save you money. They claim to automatically find and apply coupon codes when you check out online.

But Honey actually steals money from influencer's affiliate links. MegaLag's expose of Honey went viral recently but it was covered by YouTubers like Aphid Tech and Marcus 3 to 4 years ago respectively.

Stealing Commission from Influencers

Honey does not just help you save money, it also steals money from the very people who told you about it, influencers.

It does this by hijacking affiliate links at the checkout.

For example, say you watch a Linus Tech Tips video and click his affiliate link to buy a new CPU.

Honey removes Linus's browser cookie and replaces it with its own. A cookie is a digital referral that allows websites like Amazon to track the people who bought from an influencer's channel so Amazon can pay a commission to the appropriate influencer.

The Honey extension loads a small, hidden tab to force this change, all without you knowing.

It's like a sleazy salesman at a store snatching a customer's referral card at the checkout and replacing with their own to get the sale.

Exploiting "Last Click"

Honey uses a practice called "last click" attribution. This means whoever gets the last click before a purchase gets the commission.

Honey always pops up right before the checkout, making it nearly impossible for others to compete.

They also use "Honey Gold" now called "PayPal Rewards" to grab those clicks. This program gives a tiny bit of cashback while they take most of the commission.

In a test of the NordVPN affiliate program, Honey took a $35 commission, and gave back only $0.89 to the user.

Even worse, Honey will grab a last click, even when it has nothing to offer, simply by being present at checkout.

Simply clicking the button "Got It" when Honey has nothing to offer will give PayPal a commission.

Honey even prompts users to check out using PayPal to steal the sale, even when the option is available at checkout.

The Lie to Consumers

Honey gives its partner stores control of the coupon codes shown on the platform.

Turns out, you can actually "control the discount code percentage" when working with Honey.

Honey's FAQ for partners confirms this, stating "as a partner you have control over the content hosted on the honey platform."

Honey doesn't find users the best deals; it shows the deals the stores approved.

Honey told consumers it would find the best deals while promising businesses it would prevent consumers from finding better deals.

They completely lied in their advertising to the people using the service. Honey's case is one of the most aggressive marketing scams of the century.

Honey spent big on marketing. They sponsored almost 5,000 videos across roughly 1,000 different YouTube channels, racking up over 7.8 billion views. The presenter shows a list of claims made by honey all of which are false.

Honey potentially stole over multiple billion dollars of influencer's affiliate commission.

In the world of business, Honey isn't the only one doing unethical things. There are many startups who have done unethical things to get to billions in revenue.

There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Hat Tip to Honey for telling me about the Honey scam. Poetic justice.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Best ELI5 of OpenAI's o3 model yet!

In summary, expect a new model every 3 months from now.

Hopefully, we get o4 in March 2025 and the full o3 will become as cheap as o3-mini is now.

These models solve complex problems in 1-shot given all the details.

2/

In entrepreneurship, you only have to win bigly once.

The same is true for SEO. Get to high-DR rating once and then give backlinks to your new projects.

Bonus if you are a massive influencer so you can get everyone to link to your own site from their site. Plus you get social link juice from big social media sites for being an influencer.

3/

This is true across industries from designers to programmers to even doctors. Cody is a senior web developer with a top-tier YouTube channel.

If you aren't achieving 5x-10x productivity using AI, you are doing something wrong.

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