Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam (23:11)
Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam (23:11)
Was Honey a legitimate money saving tool? Or just an affiliate marketing scam promoted by some of YouTube's biggest influencers?
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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.
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The whole thing just sounds like a data collecting scam, having PayPal involved is confirmation.
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Thanks for giving the tldw. I had no idea about the referral code
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For anyone else wondering: It is about a sketchy browser extension. Not about the delicious breadspread.
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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.
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I thought the mead bottles I bought for Christmas were getting caught in some drama
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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.
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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
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Markiplier was right!