Honey has lost 8 million Chrome users in a year, accused of fraud

The PayPal-owned extension Honey has been revealed for various shady practices over the past year, and in a new video, it’s detailed that the extension knowingly broke affiliate rules, effectively frauding networks, all while the extension continues to lose users.

Honey’s promise of delivering coupons to your online shopping experience is an inherently attractive one, but it turns out there’s been a lot happening behind the scenes. First and foremost, Honey was always funded via affiliate links, in turn often “stealing” the credit for a sale from affiliate publishers such as content creators. More problematic, though, was that Honey was accused of directly lying to its users and hiding coupons on the request of another website, despite promising to always show “the best coupons.”

That initial exposé led to Honey losing around 3 million of its Chrome users, and eventually led to Google enacting new policies for Chrome extensions to block what Honey was doing.

As of December 31, 2025, roughly a year after shady tactics were first revealed, Honey has dropped to 12 million users on Chrome. That’s down 8 million from the 20 million users it had prior to the video’s publishing.

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And if that isn’t enough, it certainly sounds like PayPal’s Honey is in for a fun future, as another video from MegaLag reveals in detail how Honey has intentionally been breaking affiliate network rules. As it turns out, many affiliate networks have a policy against automated tools like Honey taking over affiliate credits when another publisher’s code is already in use, requiring those tools to “stand down” if such a code is active. Honey will do this, the video details, but it uses a combination of factors such as your account age, cashback history, and monitoring the cookies in your browser to determine whether or not it can safely break those rules and take credit for the sale after all.

In other words, it sure sounds like a form of fraud. That’ll be up to the lawyers to decide, but needless to say, Honey was running some very shady tactics here, including pulling more user data than anyone would rightfully expect.

You can uninstall Honey by right-clicking on the extension and clicking “Remove from Chrome.”

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