what's going on everyone Jeremy here from the quartering you may have been seeing some news floating around about this perhaps the biggest schas or scam and YouTube history involving not just lonus Tech tips but Mr Beast uh moist critical and everybody else who uh now is taking a bit of heat it turns out that honey I don't know if you remember remember you see ads for honey like all the time essentially it was a browser extension well uh turns out it's a huge scam and it was uh brought forth by YouTuber Mega leg so you
should definitely check out his full video on it but I do want to cover the Fallout and the aftershocks of it because it is absolutely Bonkers let's check this out uh now by the way I just want to remind everybody this Christmas season quarter cast is my live stream channel I prefer you watch on Rumble download the rumble app follow the quartering watch there but if you're YouTube only viewer I'm live every day at 1 Eastern there but also while Tim is on vacation so this tonight Thursday night Friday night this week and then all
of next week we will put on an extra show at ad Eastern um to uh help fill the void of your nightly news so if you're a YouTube only viewer please subscribe to quarter cast is linked in the description below or if you're a rumbler please do just make sure uh you are ready for two streams a day now suspicious savings now this is an app now I want to point out you know sure Mr Beast and moist critical and um all these people will be are taking some flak but it isn't their app you
know it isn't their uh app or their company this kind of happened like back when remember the what was it the Scottish land thing the established titles thing where creators were taking like incredible heat just for promoting a program as if we also owned it or something like that um so I don't really blame them for taking the ads because they probably didn't know that this was going on but a YouTube video exposing Honey's business practices has drawn suspicion on the service uh honey is a browser extension that has been widely promoted by influencers to
help find help customers find discounts but the software seems too good to be the true and is now facing accusations of misleading practices and quite frankly stealing these influencers money honey was founded in 2012 and by 2014 the extension had experienced explosive growth with over 900,000 users already using it honey promised that it would automatically apply discount codes even if you missed them deepo trailer more like Trader founder of La latest freest stuff.co oh wait no not him okay never mind explained free discount code brow browser extension should be on everyone's browser after AB blockers
I think it's the most important thing you could have it's like free money oh is it when you shop on a website with the Chrome extension installed for free you see a little popup suggesting there may be some sort of discount code available at checkout you can try the codes and see if they save you money these extensions save you from manually searching Google and going to lots of different coupon code websites it's right there for where you want it the service was promoted by me many popular influencers including Mr Beast and Marquez brownley it
was bought by PayPal in 2020 for 4 billion dollar and REM renamed PayPal honey uh the supposed this supposedly prioritizes oh wait I'm sorry YouTube meal claimed his recent video that honey selectively displays discount codes at checkout this supposedly prioritizes those that benefit the business partners over the better deals available to users Mega leg explained that honey sometimes shows smaller discounts such as 5% off even when more significant savings like 30% are available honey partners with businesses that dictate which codes are promoted potentially costing the consumers's money he further alleged that these actions contradict the
extension's promise to provide the deals automatically meal leg claimed the extensions re I'm going to show you a video of this by the way uh the extension re attributes sales made through affiliate links ensuring honey not the influencers actually got credit for the sale so when you use like an affiliate link if there's like you know like when I promote something I generally don't get paid per item it's just so the advertisers can know if their sale worked well let's say I I were getting I generally turn down um we pay you x per install
because I feel like companies lie and this is perfect this just proves me right but I generally turn those deals down but essentially they'll say hey Jeremy here's a promo code and a link and every time your customer clicks that link you get paid a few bucks that's how affiliate links work but according to this video they were actually replacing the replacing the affiliate link with their own So Not only would the customer save less money in some cases but honey would actually be the affiliate instead of the Creator look at this tips video lus
tells you about this free browser extension that saves you money online you install it in two clicks and boom you have honey perfect timing because it just so happens you're looking to buy a new CPU for your computer you come across another Linus Tech tips video and after watching you're convinced you should buy the one recommended in this video so you scroll down and find Linus's affiliate link to that product now for those of you who don't know when you click an affiliate link and buy something The influencer Who promoted the product earns a commission
for referring you to that store so you add the product you car get to the check page and hello honey says they found you 10 coupon codes sweet awesome yeah it's this is how it was intended to work you click a polite discounts and honey gets to work but unfortunately none of the coupon codes work doesn't matter though because as honey has promised us for years that means we know we've got the best deal so you complete your purchase you're happy your new CPU is on the way lonus is happy he's getting his commission everyone's
happy right well except neither one of them well let's quickly rewind and see what was happening behind the scenes you see after clicking Linus's affiliate link you'll notice in the URL there's a tracking tag labeled short circuit that's tied to a shot a reference to one of Linus's YouTube channels and this tracking tag is how new knows who to pay a commission to we can also see that this tracking tag has been saved on my browser in the form of a cookie that will expire in 30 days that way if we only decide to complete
the purchase a few days later lonus will still be credited the sale it's kind of like when you're at a department store buying a TV and the salesman who helped you gives you a referral card or a receipt with their name on it so when you eventually get to the checkout counter the clerk knows which salesman to award the sale to you can think of affiliate cookies as a digital version of that so what happened when we got to the checkout page well once honey popped up watch what happened to lioness's affiliate cookie after now
here's the here's the crime clicked allegedly appli discounts oop gone you see that honey K Min removed Linus's affiliate cookie and replace it with their own claiming credit for the sale and pocketing the commission money for themselves yeah now if we quickly go back again we can see what's causing this to happen after clicking apply discounts what you'll notice is that in the top left corner of your browser honey discreetly opens a small new tab which acts like a that that's a that's illegal that's like click Arbitrage or whatever or like it's creating a fake
click simulated referral click as if they were the ones to refer you to the website even though you're already on the website and at the checkout page once that page has finished loading and has stuffed PayPal's affiliate cookie the tab automatically closes leaving you blissfully unaware that anything ever happened it's very sneaky now when I first discovered this was Happ now what's Wild is I mean lonus Mr Beast all these people I would think should totally be suing I I would think you know like I would I would certainly think that these these people should
be suing this company into Oblivion I I don't really understand how you would uh how how you could possibly um you know get out of that lawsuit happening I thought there's no way why would all these high-profile influences be promoting a company that is actively poaching their affiliate commissions it didn't make any sense so to make sure I wasn't going crazy I went on a honey testing spree clicking one affiliate link after another and it kept happening but even after all those tests I scoured the internet to see if anyone now here's a possibility maybe
they only get the commission for a certain period of time now that their deals with honey are expired the link redirects that's possible that's possible um coffee Zill say is insanely predatory great investigation every YouTuber promoted this should make an update to Consumers who act what's actually under the hood we've been sold a lie it's free it's the best deal it's not the best deal and it's stealing from the people who actually bring the traffic can't wait to see the rest what's interesting is watch this I found working codes for these and even when honey
did find me a code I was often able to find another code of bit of value kind of strange given they claim that well thanks to Honey manually searching for coupon codes is now a thing of the past another Oddity was that honey would often only find me honey branded coupon codes such as honey 5 or honey 10 which is it means that it's a deal that they worked with the advertiser why would a store only have honey branded coupon codes kind of weird right but the biggest red flag was that when I tried submitting
the better coupon codes I'd found honey wasn't adding them to their database so why not well eventually I figured out what was going on turn out one of the key benefits for stores partnering with honey is that they given full control over which coupon codes go live on the platform if any at all I discovered this while listening to a podcast produced by Honey which appears to be aimed at attracting new businesses to let me reiterate that so honey goes to the new egg and says hey I know you have a million promo cards out
there but which one would you like us to serve up so even if there's you know Black Friday promo codes or 20 30% off promo codes the honey app would only serve the ones that the advertiser are paying for so not only are they ripping off Mr Beast Marcus brownley anyone that promoted it certainly I would have promoted the app back then why wouldn't I right so anybody that's promoting it uh absolutely gets uh screwed over but now the C the it's lying about its business practices it's actively working behind the scenes to provide you
the worst a less good option so the so New Egg potentially saves money so you don't find the better promo code you think you're still happy and honey gets paid on the affiliate deal and I mean it is W it feels I'm not a lawyer but it it feels wildly wildly illegal um you know this smells like a good class action lawsuit they scammed the influencers but worse they scammed you the consumers who used it a huge shout out I recommend watching the whole video from meal leg uh over on YouTube and subscribing to his
channel appears he does incredible work uh but wow wow wow wow uh this will be interesting to follow and give updates as as the situation develops I hope you enjoyed this video if you did make sure to leave a like on it remember to uninstall that honey app and we'll talk to you again real soon
