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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    19 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.

      • zante@slrpnk.net
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        18 hours ago

        This is worse than the great wasabi swindle, where the supply chains were infiltrated by horseradish dyed green.

        • merthyr1831@lemmy.ml
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          8 hours ago

          was that infiltration or was that just because real wasabi doesn’t have a long shelf life when grated so horseradish is a cheaper and more stable alternative?

  • DahGangalang@infosec.pub
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    19 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
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      18 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