Honey is an app that promises to find customers the best discount codes for whatever they were buying, at whatever website they were on. But it turns out to be super scammy.
Honey is a browser extension, which is a little piece of software you install in your browser to add some functionality. Some popular browser extensions are ones that block ads, or manage passwords for you, or check your spelling or grammar. After you install an extension, there’s a button right in your browser that you can click anytime to get access to that extension.
Around 2019, I started hearing about the free browser extension Honey. What Honey claimed to do was find you the best discount codes for whatever you were buying online.
What’s an affiliate link?
To understand how Honey works, let’s first look at affiliate links.
An affiliate link is a link to a product that names someone as the salesperson for that product, so the salesperson will get a commission if you buy something. We see a lot of this on YouTube, with affiliate links in the video’s description.
Like, say you’re watching a video where your favorite chef is preparing a spicy meal. In the video, she’s using this really cool and unique chef’s knife. In the video’s description, there’s a link to a website for Blacksmith Bob’s Better Blades where you can buy the knife for yourself.
But the link isn’t just a link. After the web address, it has a bunch of letters and numbers tacked onto the end of it that tell Blacksmith Bob that the chef is the one that sent you to his website. So if you click the link and buy something from Blacksmith Bob, the chef will automatically get a little commission.
That’s an affiliate link, with the chef being an affiliate of Blacksmith Bob’s Better Blades.
The Honey scam
So, say you were at Blacksmith Bob’s website, checking out that knife that your favorite chef recommended. The affiliate link is sitting there in the address bar.
If you have the Honey extension installed, you can click on the extension and Honey will look for discount codes you can apply to the price of the knife.
But then, Honey comes back and says, “Sorry, I couldn’t find anything.” This was a problem with Honey, that it often wouldn’t find valid discount codes that you could find manually, or was paid by certain vendors to not show them or to only show particular ones. Already kind of scammy, but it gets worse.
So you’re looking at this and thinking, oh well, I’m just going to go ahead and get the knife anyway, and support my favorite chef in the process. You click the checkout button, fill in your credit card information, and you go your merry way.
Here’s the thing. As soon as you clicked on that Honey button, Honey replaced the chef’s affiliate link with its own affiliate link. This means that any commissions that would have gone to the chef, are now going to go to Honey.
Yep, you heard that right. As soon as you click anything on the Honey extension, whether it finds a discount code or not, it replaces that YouTuber’s affiliate link with its own affiliate code. So Honey gets the commission, not the YouTuber.
The promotion scam
When Honey was hiring all these YouTubers to promote Honey, they never mentioned this affiliate link swap. Most, if not all, of the YouTubers they paid to promote Honey have affiliate links themselves, and Honey fooled them into promoting something that would take their own commissions away.
When Honey first came out, nobody could figure out how a free browser extension that looked for discount codes was going to make money. And now we know.
But what goes around, comes around: in December 2024, a group of lawyers filed a $5 million class action lawsuit against Honey for its deceptive marketing and affiliate link practices.
Take action!
If you have the Honey extension, be sure to remove it from your browser. While it might not be stealing your money, it is doing absolutely nothing for you.
Next, be wary of any browser extensions that claim they’re going to save you money or make you money. Companies don’t give out free money, so there’s probably a catch.
And the best thing you can do is, never buy or download anything a YouTuber is advertising, not without doing plenty of research. YouTubers have come under a lot of fire over the past few years for promoting scammy products, and Honey is just the latest one.
You can listen to an audio podcast about the Honey scam, including a deeper dive into coupon history and pitfalls, in Season 3, Episode 10 of the How Hacks Happen podcast.
