Display omitted •Honey adulteration with corn syrup, agave syrup, and sugarcane molasses under study.•Sample preparation involves dilution in water alone.•Spectral fingerprint obtained by UV–Vis spectroscopy used as analytical information.•OC-PLS and DD-SIMCA with different pre-processing techniques were evaluated.•DD-SIMCA prediction for offset correction had a 100% of sensitivity and specificity. This work proposes the use of UV–Vis spectroscopy and one-class classifiers to authenticate honey in terms of their individual and simultaneous adulterations with corn syrup, agave syrup, and sugarcane molasses. Then, spectra of aqueous authentic (n = 73) and adulterated (n = 162) honey samples were recorded. Before the construction of OC-PLS and DD-SIMCA models, different pre-processing techniques were used to removed baseline shifts. The best result obtained by DD-SIMCA using offset correction, correctly classifying all the samples in the test set. Therefore, the proposed methodology can be used as a promising tool to authenticate honey and prevent fraudulent labeling, affording security to consumers and providing an alternative to regulatory agencies. Moreover, it avoids laborious sample preparation and additional operational costs, since the analytical information is acquired using a routine instrumental technique, without the need for any sample preparation step, other than dilution of the samples in water alone.