Was Honey a legitimate money saving tool? Or just an affiliate marketing scam promoted by some of YouTube’s biggest influencers?

  • egrets@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    Video’s worth watching, but the gist of it: a free browser extension promoted by YouTubers and owned by PayPal is advertised as a way to very easily apply the best available coupon code to web stores at checkout. It often fails to find codes, but it also adds a PayPal referral code/cookie to your purchase, so they net a referral fee, even if it found no coupon.

    This is nefarious in and of itself, but it also means that the channels they sponsor lose out on referral fees from their viewers, because it replaces their own referral code/cookie. YouTubers would not have known this when accepting the sponsorship and promoting the browser extension.

    • ShareMySims
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      4 hours ago

      The whole thing just sounds like a data collecting scam, having PayPal involved is confirmation.

    • ShareMySims
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      4 hours ago

      Though anyone who loves the foodstuff should also definitely be wary of scams - in the UK it was recently reported that nine in ten honey samples fail authenticity test (TL;DR: most honey you buy is just sugar syrup), I don’t doubt it’s just as bad in many other countries, and almost certainly worst in the US.

  • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
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    4 hours ago

    REALLY appreciate the breakdown on this.

    I remember when Honey first started going around being tempted to install it, but after some critical this king I couldn’t figure out how an app/extension like that could make the money to pay for all these ads. Sketched me out and I never installed it. Real glad I didn’t.

    • MrTolkinghoen@lemmy.zip
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      4 hours ago

      These bullshit addons are all just data vacuums. Capital one has a similar coupon add-on they keep trying to push on me.

      No gtfo