The Honey browser extension – which offers to find you coupon codes for online retailers – is being accused of a massive scam that both fails to find the deals it promises for its users and hijacks affiliate revenue from online creators that depend on that revenue to support their content channels.

A years-long investigation by YouTuber MegaLag exposed some very disturbing data.

LifeHacker’s David Nield explains how Honey fails in it’s job to find the “best” coupon codes:

Honey is a browser extension meant to give you any relevant discount codes available when you shop online and automatically apply them to your checkout price, instantly saving you money…But Honey seems too good to be true: In tests across multiple sites, MegaLag was able to manually find working coupon codes when Honey couldn’t find any, or better coupon codes than the ones automatically Honey applied. What’s more, when bigger discounts are applied at checkout, Honey doesn’t appear to add these codes to its database.

This is allegedly how Honey strikes deals with retailers, by giving them control over the discount codes that shoppers can access.

And how it is depriving affiliates of revenue:

Honey has been heavily promoted by a long list of online influencers in the past, including MrBeast and Marques Brownlee. According to MegaLag, the Honey extension deletes affiliate link cookies from these influencers when people click through to products from their YouTube videos and other sites, which would mean the influencers aren’t paid for the referral. Instead, Honey would get their commission. This allegedly happens even if no discounts are applied.

Another example of how extensions and apps can quickly go bad.