Gates, who’s Invoice Gates’ daughter, based the app alongside Sophia Kianni.
In response to a number of experiences, the AI-powered purchasing plugin Phia used a tactic often known as cookie stuffing to connect its affiliate code to gross sales it did not truly drive. Phia, which launched final spring, was co-founded by Phoebe Gates — Invoice Gates’ daughter — and Sophia Kianni. Investigations by researcher Ben Edelman, Bloomberg and Capital One Buying all reportedly discovered situations of the browser extension claiming referrals by means of pretend clicks, and even taking credit score for gross sales that different publishers ought to have gotten the fee for.
Edelman printed an in depth breakdown on how this labored, full with a video displaying Phia’s “affiliate hyperlink invisibly loaded right into a second tab” on iOS after visiting a product owner’s web site. It is value studying by means of.
Phia has blamed the problems highlighted within the investigations on a bug. In an announcement to Bloomberg, a spokesperson for the corporate mentioned, “Inside the final 24 hours, we have been made conscious that in a current launch our codebase was inflicting misattributions from a subset of customers. As quickly as we have been notified, our group labored in a single day to determine, mitigate, and has since resolved the problem.” The function that enabled all of this rolled out in December 2025, Edelman and Bloomberg each reported.
