We're Fighting Back Against Honey and Helping You Do the Same!

What is the PayPal Honey/Capital One Scandal?

If you're unaware, YouTuber MegaLag recently exposed the browser extension PayPal Honey for stealing affiliate commissions from content creators (like us) who provide buying advice and reviews. This might even make sense if they were providing you with a better deal, but apparently having the extension enabled at all can change the affiliate tag from ours to theirs even when they aren't saving you any money! They also collude with stores to hide the best possible deals from you in some cases, so it seems like they aren't adding much value for shoppers while making money off it anyways. This realization exploded across the internet and has now led to multiple lawsuits against PayPal Honey and the similar Capital One Shopping extension. Check out MegaLag's video below for more in depth details of how Honey is doing this.

What are We Doing About It?

Since we earn the majority of our revenue from affiliate sales through our website, our development team got to work right away on a fix. Even better, we decided to make it free and open source. Here’s how it works: the code allows a website to perform one of the following actions if an unwanted browser plugin is installed and activated:

• Pop-up to prevent website access completely
• Pop-up warning that can be dismissed
• No pop-up, just monitoring the extensions used on your website

We are going with the second option, as we are hopeful that buyers will make the choice to disable it once they are fully informed.

By default, we have set the code to detect the browser extensions Honey, Capital One Shopping and others like them. You can of course change this. We’ve built the code to be flexible, so it is 100% up to your discretion as to how you use it. The code is available right now in the Node Package Manager (NPM), linked here. From there you can contribute to the project with feature requests, bugs, code suggestions, and that sort of thing. As stated, the code is open source and will be released under Josh's alma mater MIT's Open Source license.

Next Steps

Now, many content creators don’t have a website. They just share links in the description of their videos. Because of this, we are considering providing a pass-through service where once a user clicks a link, the same functionality runs: Block, Warn, or Monitor. All at the content creator’s discretion. Unlike Honey and Capital One, we will not swipe their commission. If we get enough support for this project, that’s something we will either move forward with ourselves or partner with another company on.

We're also joining the fight from a legal perspective. We have raised our hand to be a lead plaintiff in the class action case against Capital One filed by the lawyers Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, LLP. This is the same firm that Gamers Nexus has engaged.

Please Share This Article

Please share this article or our related video to get the word out about this code base we've created. We want to help other creators like us regain control of their revenue. On that note, thank you for your continued support through our YouTube channel and website. This support is how we get to make more and better content for you. Thanks for reading, and have an awesome rest of your day!