Remember Honey? The PayPal-owned browser extension that auto-applies discount codes to your cart when shopping online. Also, remember in December 2024 when MegaLag, a New Zealand YouTuber, published a video entitled Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam, which revealed that the extension was secretly replacing original affiliate tracking cookies with its own, in order to take credit for the sale and earn the commission? A few weeks after the video published, I reported that content creators sued Honey over the practice.
Well, flash forward almost two years, and MegaLag returned with a new video investigation reporting that Honey lost 7M Chrome users and around 7,000 merchant partners since his original video dropped (though he’s posted a few updates since). His investigation revealed that Honey’s collection of coupon codes also declined from around 90k to 50k, and that at least 10k of the remaining codes have already expired.
MegaLag notes a few other post-investigation happenings and fallouts:
- Rakuten Advertising, Impact.com, and Awin Group suspended Honey from their networks, though Rakuten eventually added them back after introducing a new system to prevent affiliate hijacking.
- The creator lawsuit against PayPal survived multiple attempts by PayPal to have it dismissed, and the case is now in discovery, meaning creators can pull internal communications and depose employees.
- Google changed Chrome Web Store policy to restrict extensions doing what Honey did, though apparently not well enough (keep reading).
- MegaLag’s new research, done alongside researcher Ben Edelman, also revealed that Honey can now tell when it’s being tested and turns off the sketchy behavior when it thinks someone’s watching, which doesn’t appear to be a bug.
Cookie-stuffing… Affiliate hijacking… Where have I heard all this before?
You might recall from last week’s edition that Phia, the AI shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is facing similar allegations. You’d think they would’ve learned from Honey’s mistake that the chickens always come home to roost, but apparently not. Even more damning is that Phia’s “enable coupon auto drop” feature ran from December 10, 2025 to July 7, 2026, immediately after Google implemented its new rules, which it seems aren’t enforced very well.
Great investigative work, as always, MegaLag. I’ll keep you posted in the future on the creator lawsuit.
