¶ Honey Scam Exposed
What's good everyone . This is Dr Nii Darko . Make sure you hit the subscribe button below so that you're always up to date on the new uploads , as well as alerts on this show .
The other thing that you can do to help build this community is make sure you leave a comment below , let us know what you like , what you don't like about the show and , ultimately , let us know who's winning these arguments , because I need to know that I'm beating Renee in these debates . Run the tape , all right . What's good everyone .
Welcome to another episode of Docs Outside the Box , joined by me , dr Nii Got .
Dr Renee , and we also joined by our team manager .
We got Kiara what's up , how you doing ? Hello See , she got a little flair too . I initially thought that she was schooling me before .
I thought that that was like army type , you know the brown t-shirt , I thought that was .
I thought that was like she's not in the army , I know she .
He has to keep telling me so she's a , she's a marine . What color is marine ? Is it like gray and red ?
it's green , red , red , isn't it ? I always see that usmc is like yellow and some red colors like the mismatch .
Well , first of , all .
We've got a bunch of uniforms , but our utilities are well now they're just green , like the green and black , that forest green and our undershirts are green .
So we don't wear brown .
The red though , is the blood stripe on the pants on the pants oh , that's what the meaning of that is .
The mismatched jacket with the pants . Like your jacket doesn't match your pants color .
Yes , I might have a picture somewhere . I'll send it to you guys .
Thank you , I always found it . I always found that kind of like . I wonder why they didn't match the blazer to the pants . Yes , our bottoms .
our trousers are lighter than our tops . Our tops like a . I want to say it's a navy blue , like a very deep navy blue , maybe black , I can never tell but the bottoms are blue with a red stripe .
Well , we do appreciate your service , so thank you very much , kiara .
She's a Marine , she'll hurt you .
Of course she'll hurt me .
She can't do as many push-ups as me , but yeah I don't know what was it 10 , you did 12 , 12 , 12 .
Yeah , I saw wait , wait , wait , wait . I saw very quickly . I saw a commercial and it said you can join the military or you could be a Marine and I was like , oh , I think that was shots fired at the army .
There's always shots fired .
Is it like friendly shots or like , do y'all like really have beef ? Not to like belabor this point , but do y'all really have beef or no ?
No , not really . I mean , I have friends in the army , I have friends in the Navy . Do you like look down on them and stuff . I have friends in the in the army .
I have friends in the Navy . Do you like look down on them and stuff , or .
I have friends who are soldiers .
Like I . Like I have black friends .
No genuine friends . They joined before , before or after me and then we have you actually meet people , like in Hawaii , and met . We had an army couple and we had a navy couple and we all just hung out together . We're all regular people . After the uniform comes off it's kind of like doctors , right ?
I don't know , I don't be talking to these surgeons .
Well , Kiara , what's in store for today's show ? Talk to us about it . What's on the agenda ?
I wanted your opinion on the honey scam .
Honey , honey honey honey honey , honey .
I heard about this .
All right , y'all . So let's talk about honey , right ? So what honey is , or what it still is , or what it was , is so honey is a company that made it super easy for you to save money anytime you wanted to buy anything online , right ? So you guys may have this on your Chrome extension right now , or you may have it on Safari right now .
I took it off about two weeks ago , but the backstory is if you wanted to go to Amazon , if you wanted to buy something from Amazon or wherever , right before you check out it , always there's an area where you can put in like a promo code , and that's where Honey really shines . And what it does is it will ask you before you purchase .
It will say , hey , can we search for different coupon codes to see if we can get you the best deal ? So , instead of paying full price , you may be paying , you know , 10% , 5% off , 30% off , all that stuff . It sounds like a great deal and initially it was great . I've been using it up until I found out about this issue a couple of weeks ago .
But what Honey has been doing ? Honey has also teamed up with a bunch of YouTubers and basically started sponsoring their videos in exchange for saying hey just kind of big us up .
Honey , you know we'll sponsor one of your videos , but just let people know , like , hey , you know honey's out there and millions of people , tens of millions of people use honey daily . It's installed on their app . So companies hate or you know , companies that sell .
They hate honey , right , because they always have to put a discount or have always can't get the full price if you have honey and we love it , right , because we get a discount .
So what honey was doing , once they reached a certain amount of users , what they started doing , which was shysty is they would go to the company and they would say hey , listen , Macy's , we got like 30 million users who are going to be able to use this 10% , 20% or 30% discount on your item , whatever it may be . Why don't we do this ?
Rather than let them use 30% , why don't we make a deal where you will give them 10% and Right , you give them 10% off and then you give us another 10% as a kickback and then we will reroute that coupon code for it to only give 20% off , basically .
So , rather than give them a 30% , rather than give the user a 30% off coupon , we'll just make sure that everybody , without even knowing , gets 20% off so that you guys save , we get our kickback , and then the customer thinks that they're getting the best deal out there , right ? So that was shysty move number one .
Then the second shysty move that they were doing is when they teamed up with the YouTubers . Each YouTuber would get a coupon code , right ? So , hey guys , like , make sure you use my coupon code and I'll get a little kickback . You're supporting the channel and then you know you'll get your discount , whatever you may get .
So what was happening is you go to Amazon , you put in you know Docs Outside the Box , dotb . Well , unknowingly , what would happen is Honey would change that code without you even knowing . If you put in , dotb would change it to their special type of code .
That would not only decrease the amount of savings that the user would get , but it would completely erase the kickback that the YouTuber would get . So that was shysty move number two . Oh Lord , this video went viral . I don't know where that video is . I got to look it up , but that video went viral . I don't know where that video is .
I gotta look it up , but that video went viral a couple of weeks ago and since then , I think honey lost at least 10 to 15 million users , like in a span of at least 48 to 72 hours . So it's crazy . But honey , this is one of those examples of honey or any of these type of apps .
Like you know , they , they're , they're , they're telling you one thing , basically it's that was that game , three card Monty , or what is that three show ? What's the show game ? I don't know .
It's that show game that you see on the streets where , like you think that you're going to win but you're always going to lose , like there's always someone out there to scam you . And yeah , that's what they were doing .
They were scamming the public and they were scamming the people who they were partnering with and , in essence , they were kind of extorting the companies also . So I took it off my , my , oh , I'll go back to using YouTube or using Google to find my promo codes and go from there .
Oh , that is thoughts , Well thoughts .
That is really messed up .
Thoughts , well , thoughts . That is really messed up . I mean , considering , you know you have what you think is a partner in Honey and all of a sudden you know this partner is actually , in essence , stealing from you . Right , they're stealing from you because what they've done is you know you've marketed for them and you didn't really pay them for the marketing .
So you , in essence , has just stolen the money . By just withholding the money that you say that they were owed , you breached the contract . That's really messed up . Do they have like stark laws ?
I don't know , but I'm assuming that it's going to be a class action lawsuit .
There's going to be a class action lawsuit .
It has to be , it is going to be a class action lawsuit .
It has to be .
I mean not only just with the YouTubers that in essence got . They basically got cheated because you know they got the money up front to make the video . But as we all know , like a lot of times that money that's really finite right . The infinite money or the real evergreen money is what you get on .
Yeah .
The what do you call the affiliate deals ?
And that's that's the affiliate deals . Like you could look at someone . Like you know , one of my favorite YouTubers is MKBHD . Right , like anything that he puts out there . You know he's the king of tech , right , anything that he puts out there is the truth .
So if he says that a product is blessed , if he says that it's whack , you know the product is going to do . You know , respectively , whatever he says , and imagine he has a link to any of those pages and if you click on his page and then you go and buy the product , you know . You know there's a windfall that you can get from it .
Like Tesla , I remember , like years ago , you know , tesla used to have this referral program .
They still do when , like , if you refer people , if you get a Tesla and then you use your link to , you know , invite other people to purchase a Tesla , then you get a whole bunch of like credits and eventually , like , you get like free supercharging for life , which it's is a big deal , right ?
Because , supercharging can cost anywhere between 20 to like $50 per charge right . So if you can get free supercharging , in essence that's like free gas for the rest of your life . That's a big deal . So he had sold so many referral links that he's got free charging for life . It's a big deal , right ?
So you can imagine if he's trying to sell like a cell phone and he's working with Honey and they pay him , I don't know . Let's say they pay him $1,000 to make a video , but the real ads , or the real money , is going to come from people purchasing , you know , or using that code .
Yeah .
That's all that money that they're stealing from him . So you know , companies ain't loyal . Let's leave it to you like that .
Well .
They are , they're loyal . They're just loyal to themselves there you go .
They're loyal , they're loyal to themselves yeah , that's a major breach , yeah , it's a big deal .
So if anybody , who anybody's listening right now , if you have honey , my advice is just take them off . So because I've noticed that , first of all , honey rarely comes up with deals anyway , in my opinion . Honey , have you used it on your ?
I've used it every now and then I can't say because you , you know , I do a lot of my shopping online Um , I can't say that I haven't installed on it , it's installed on your .
I did at one point .
It's installed on yours Not still do . Yeah , no , I mean , there's a lot of people who use it , um , but I would notice that I just every time that I would use it for , you know , over the last several years , recently , it would say that you already got the best deal anyway .
And then just kind of move on . Yeah , yeah , I don't know , yeah that's , I don't know how they thought they were going to get away
¶ Affiliate Marketing and Transparency
with that .
They were going to get away . Someone did the research it wasn't for those pesky YouTubers .
Yeah , they did the ski YouTubers . Yeah , they did research and they found out .
They're like yo , this affiliate code is not the affiliate code that they gave me . What is going on ? And then they found out .
They probably realized in the numbers when they were checking their numbers and they're like hey , this isn't this is what I thought I was supposed to be getting , but if you think about it at some point , that makes sense and if you think about it like it's a completely , it's almost like a good Samaritan type of business .
How is this going to make money ? Like you're helping me find deals , there's got to be some way that you're getting paid .
Right , I don't have a problem with them getting paid . It's a takeaway from me for you to get paid .
There's no subscriptions for it , it's just hey , just put us on your , on your browser , we'll find the best deal . So there's gotta be a way to you know they make money . It's like cash app , right ?
Like a lot of people , they love cash app initially and then they put up with the fees that they had to pay until Zelle came out and like I think I don't know how many people use cash anymore , cash app anymore . Yeah , not a lot of people are using Cash .
App as much as they used to . But you know , I don't have a problem with a company getting paid , right , like I don't expect charity work to be done . Are selling things ? Right To say , hey , okay , we're going to give your customers a discount , which , frankly , giving someone a discount potentially could make them buy more , right ?
So , whereas , you know , I might not have bought as much , you know , but now that I got a 30% discount , I might feel like , yeah , I might want to buy a little bit more . So what you weren't going to make before you're actually going to make it you know some other way . It's fine , right , it's all about volume and numbers and things like that .
But for me , I'm just like how did you think that you were going to get away with not doing ?
I mean Honey's been out there for at least 10 years .
It's the lack of transparency .
Yeah , like , I feel like if they were transparent about it , then it would have went down completely different .
Right . But I think most people would be like . Most YouTubers would be like , yeah , I don't want to deal with it's like . You know , it's the new thing now , right , which is athletes , musicians , uh , you know , if you create content , you don't want to just be paid for creating an advertisement anymore . Now you want some equity .
That equity can come up in different forms it could be stock , it could be , you know , some stake , some stake in ownership , and in this case it's well , for every sale that you make , I want a piece of that , you know . So I think that that's where you know .
Even if they said , hey , we were just going to pay you just for the videos , I think a bunch of YouTubers would be like , yeah , I can get that .
But here's the question was there a meeting of the minds ? Was there a written contract ? Or was this just the handshake ? And now it's my word against yours ? And if they were consistent with this is how we do business , I don't know why they would have thought that I would have done an affiliate deal . That's not the way my company works .
Well , I'll just leave it like this If you are a big YouTuber and you're making a video like this against one of a bigger company , like like honey , usually they're on the up and up , so I I tend to believe them not saying more so than honey , and I would think that they do deals like this all the time , so I would suspect that they would check their
contract before making a video I would hope and saying that , hey , yeah not only did , not only were they supposed to give me an affiliate deal and it's supposed to give me
¶ Shady Sales Tactics Uncovered
a . You know a code , you know . Then I looked at the numbers , it doesn't make sense . Or you know , I a code , you know . Then I looked at the numbers it doesn't make sense . Or , you know , I could see , right before the exchange is done or the checkout is done , they changed my code , but I took it off .
I took it off sales and you know it's up to you guys to decide how y'all want to work with these type of companies , but I took it off and I guess we could just leave it at that for the sake of the conversation . Let's keep it moving , so yeah .