The Honey Files Expose Major Fraud!

Quick Overview

The Honey extension appears to intentionally hide or ignore stand-down rules designed to prevent affiliates from poaching commissions, as evidenced by the discovery of an internal rule file ('ssd.json') that explicitly lists affiliate networks but fails to enforce stand-down rules for those networks, suggesting a deliberate effort to mislead both users and partners regarding commission attribution.

Key Points: Honey's internal stand-down rules file ('ssd.json') explicitly lists affiliate networks like CJ, Linkshare, Rakuten, Awin, and Swagbucks, indicating awareness of affiliate tracking mechanisms (03:56, 03:41). The 'base' rules in 'ssd.json' set the user point threshold ('uP') to 501 and user age check ('uA') to 259,200,000 milliseconds (approximately 8 months), which are relatively low thresholds compared to the 20,000 points required for Recruited Links (LS) (02:36, 02:21). The rules also feature a 'GA' array containing tracking identifiers like 'CONTID', 'svi', 'ga', 'networkGroup', and 'gid' associated with affiliate networks, suggesting deep tracking of user activity across domains (02:59). When testing with an affiliate link (e.g., Newegg via Rakuten's LinkShare), Honey's extension immediately shows 'Honey is disabled on this site' (03:38, 15:15), while an account with high points and age receives cash back, showing differential treatment. An older archived version of the stand-down rules (Honey-4.0.18-2014-12-16.zip) from 2014 shows no 'gca' or 'bl' rules, suggesting these compliance checks were added later, potentially as a reaction to past issues (03:59, 03:40). The explicit stand-down rules found in the code (e.g., for CJ, Linkshare, Rakuten, Awin, Swagbucks) conflict with the observed behavior where the extension fails to stand down when an affiliate link is clicked (15:11, 15:54), implying the rules are either not being enforced or are being overridden. Security researcher Ben Edelman's findings suggest that Honey developers are aware of these rules but may be intentionally circumventing them to maintain lucrative affiliate partnerships (03:34, 03:48).