While watching famous videos of YouTubers like Mr. Beast, viewers have regularly seen advertisements for Honey, a coupon and cashback browser extension owned by PayPal, pop up.
Its pitch is that “Honey is free, easy to install and saves you money without any effort.” It sounds harmless and perhaps even smart to install as a way of saving money on products, right?
Wrong.
It turns out that Honey’s methods of generating money are much more underhanded than meets the eye.
In a video, tech YouTuber MegaLag alleged that Honey has been stealing money from YouTubers by overwriting affiliate links, which are URLs that offer the promoters a commission for leading a customer to buy a product.
Additionally, even when Honey cannot find any coupons, they will often create a pop-up with a meaningless confirmation button for the user to click, replacing any original affiliate link with their own or adding their own if there was none.
As if these methods of making money weren’t misleading enough, they blatantly lied about their claims of promising the best coupons. According to Megalag, when Honey partners with sellers, they give complete control over the coupons shown by honey to the site owners, preventing customers from using or trying to search for better coupons.
Cashback and free rewards services are never meant to be charitable. Instead, they aim to give customers an incentive to use their service, through which they earn money. Credit card companies like Chase offer cash back for exclusive, paid memberships, and websites like Rakuten promote products and get affiliate commissions.
Encapsulating the very essence of the saying “there ain’t no such thing as free lunch,” Honey, a company valued at $4 billion, appears to have successfully tricked the media and stolen millions of dollars from the very influencers that promoted them, teaching us a valuable lesson to not trust seemingly miraculous ways of earning and saving free money online.
