By Elie Monnickendam, Year 12,
Online shopping has taken over the world! Everyone around me (including myself) uses online stores to buy whatever they need. Some people even make a living online by shopping online.
In 2019, PayPal, the internet conglomerate, acquired the software Honey, a discount-code assistant, for a whopping 4 billion U.S. dollars. Honey allows users to search for discount codes that can be applied to products when online shopping, absolutely free of charge. Sounds too good to be true, right? It is. A recent investigation revealed a shocking truth behind the Honey system and how it really generates profit.
Some people can make a living using “affiliate marketing”, where they advertise certain products, and make money if a person uses their link to buy that product! It’s an interesting hustle that generates a nice paycheck at the end of the month. A video by MegaLag was published on the 22nd of December, 2024, where he describes how the Honey shopping extension works. He discovers that Honey always applies its own affiliate code at the end of each purchase made while the Honey extension is installed. Affiliate codes are used to specify who receives a piece of a purchase as a reward for referring the person to the purchase.
Simply put, Honey steals the affiliate commissions from whoever originally supplied the link by applying their own code. If the user doesn’t have an affiliate code applied at all, Honey will still apply their own in order to receive the commission. Even if Honey doesn’t find a discount code, it’ll still steal the commission! One viable reason why Honey wasn’t discovered as a scam software was due to the Snopes study on the legitimacy of the Honey service in 2018, one year before PayPal purchased Honey! The practical timing brought Honey a good rep and cleared it of misdeeds and controversy.
As Technopedia describes it, the whole situation is a textbook situation of “lack of transparency.” Technopedia also describes the situation as a nasty “man-in-the-middle” attack, a pretty cool reference to cyber-security! The same group ran an experiment based off of the MegaLag video and could recreate the same issues that MegaLag experienced, with Honey distracting the user with heavy popups and accessing the browser data in order to change the affiliate link “cookie” in order to supply the online-store with
MegaLag, surprisingly, isn’t the first to pick up on Honey’s scam techniques. One Twitter nerd in 2021 discovered the affiliate link re-programming and posted about it; he claimed, “You can just pull up their codes and open a different browser and go there with an original affiliate link so they don’t steal the sale.” LinusMediaGroup, one significant media corporation (you probably know Linus as the tech dude that drops expensive PC parts in his videos), even decided to terminate their partnership with Honey because of the exact stuff they’re doing now! This forum post explains, “Honey will override that tracking link even if they don’t find you a deal.” they also say that that behavior doesn’t “jive” with them (understandably so).
