Gates, who’s Invoice Gates’ daughter, based the app alongside Sophia Kianni.
In keeping with a number of studies, the AI-powered buying plugin Phia used a tactic often known as cookie stuffing to connect its affiliate code to gross sales it did not really 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 Procuring all reportedly discovered cases of the browser extension claiming referrals via faux clicks, and even taking credit score for gross sales that different publishers ought to have gotten the fee for.
Edelman revealed a detailed 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 price studying via.
Phia has blamed the problems highlighted within the investigations on a bug. In an announcement to Bloomberg, a spokesperson for the corporate mentioned, “Throughout the final 24 hours, we have been made conscious that in a latest launch our codebase was inflicting misattributions from a subset of customers. As quickly as we have been notified, our staff labored in a single day to determine, mitigate, and has since resolved the problem.” The characteristic that enabled all of this rolled out in December 2025, Edelman and Bloomberg each reported.
