Bloomberg Investigation Exposes How Phia’s Browser Extension Allegedly Hijacked Rival Affiliate Commissions At Checkout

A hot startup built on celebrity glamour and two young founders’ names just collided with one of advertising’s oldest scams. Phia, the AI shopping extension co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, stands accused of “cookie stuffing” — quietly overriding other companies’ referral codes to pocket commissions it never earned. The fallout has already cost the company its place on Impact.com, a major affiliate network, and reopened uncomfortable questions about how fast venture money moves compared to how fast anyone checks the code underneath.

Phia launched in 2025 as a free browser extension co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, promising shoppers they would “never overpay.” It compares prices across roughly 220,000 retail sites and auto-applies discount codes, earning revenue the same way most shopping tools do: affiliate commissions when a referred user completes a purchase. The company raised more than $43.5 million in venture funding, reaching a valuation near $185 million, backed by Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins, with celebrity investors including Kim Kardashian and Hailey Bieber. On July 9, 2026, Bloomberg published an investigation alleging the app was rigging that entire commission system, and the story has snowballed across TechCrunch, Inc., and the trade press since.

The Mechanics Of A Digital Sleight Of Hand

According to Bloomberg’s testing, corroborated by independent testing from Capital One Shopping and researcher Ben Edelman, the Phia extension did not wait for a user to click its own affiliate link. If a shopper visited an online retailer on their own, or arrived through a competing affiliate program like Wirecutter, Phia would quietly open a new background tab.

During checkout, it would override the referral codes belonging to other affiliates and insert its own, letting it claim credit for a purchase it never actually influenced. Startup Fortune reported Bloomberg tested this pattern across more than 50 retail sites and found it held consistently. This is not a gray area. It has a name, a history, and a rap sheet.

What Ben Edelman Found In The Code

Edelman, an affiliate-marketing researcher who reviewed Phia’s publicly available code, told Inc. that the behavior looked deliberate rather than accidental. “There is a setting to turn it on and off. No one makes a setting to turn on or off something that was accidental, that they didn’t intend their code to do in the first place,” he said.

He estimated the tactic let Phia claim credit for as many as ten times the number of purchases it had actually influenced, and separately told Technology.org, “The most fundamental requirement in affiliate marketing is that commission is only paid if a user clicks.” BigGo Finance reported the disputed code was allegedly added to Phia’s source in December 2025, months before Kianni and Gates’ company was caught.

Why Lawyers, Not Just Engineers, Are Watching

Consumer-protection experts say the real damage falls on the publishers and retailers whose legitimate referrals were quietly swapped out. Lauren Willis, a Loyola Law School professor specializing in consumer finance, told Inc. this raises an unfair-competition problem regardless of intent. “Stealing money from a competitor is not legal even if done by mistake — although, based on the allegations here, a software glitch seems incredibly unlikely,” she said.

Bonnie Patten of Truth in Advertising added that shoppers deserve clear disclosure of how an extension earns its money, warning “when that autonomy is undermined by rogue software, it is deceptive and problematic.” Impact.com has already suspended the company’s account, and Awin, another major affiliate network, is reviewing the allegations too.

Phia’s Response And The Honey Precedent

A Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg the company, co-led by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has “always maintained compliance” and framed the conduct as unintended, adding that fixes were made once the issue was flagged. Bloomberg’s own follow-up check confirmed the override behavior had stopped, though it remains unclear whether that satisfies retailers and partners still reviewing the relationship.

Marketing consultant Mary Ann O’Brien told Inc. the damage isn’t necessarily financial to consumers but reputational: “Once trust is questioned, every future interaction is viewed through a different lens.” The comparison writing itself is PayPal’s Honey, which faced a near-identical scandal, an ongoing class-action lawsuit, and reportedly lost as many as 4 million users after its own cookie-stuffing was exposed.

The Uncomfortable Diligence Question

What makes Phia different from a routine ad-tech scandal is the size of the check and the wattage of the names who wrote it, and the names on the founding team. Startup Fortune put it bluntly: cookie stuffing is “one of the oldest tricks in ad tech, well documented since the early 2000s,” and easy enough to catch that “a diligence team can catch it in an afternoon: install the extension, watch the network traffic during checkout.”

Bloomberg did exactly that. So did Edelman, working entirely outside the deal. For venture firms that poured eight figures into Gates and Kianni’s company, whose entire business model runs on affiliate commissions, missing that the mechanics of the model were allegedly rigged is not a minor blind spot — it’s the whole spreadsheet.

Shopping extensions and cashback apps have exploded across Singapore, Jakarta, and Kuala Lumpur, riding the same wave of price-comparison hype that built Phia’s user base in the US. The lesson from this scandal travels well beyond American retailers. Regional shoppers using similar tools should understand that “free” browser extensions are rarely free — they are quietly monetized through commissions that can be manipulated without a single visible sign to the user.

Phia’s funding round, worth roughly Rp 785.6 billion, or close to SGD 56.1 million at 14,000 IDR per SGD, shows how much capital is chasing this category across borders, including from Southeast Asian and diaspora investors drawn to celebrity-backed consumer apps founded by Gates and Kianni. As affiliate networks like Impact.com and Awin tighten enforcement globally, expect regional retailers and publishers to start auditing their own extension partnerships far more aggressively than before. For more news and editorial content, visit our page to stay updated.

Sources:
[1] Gates Heir’s Shopping App Claimed Sales It Didn’t Drive
[2] Phia accused of ‘cookie stuffing,’ taking affiliate credit on purchases it didn’t earn
[3] Phoebe Gates’s Startup Phia Was Just Accused of ‘Cookie Stuffing.’ Here’s What Happens Next
[4] Shopping Startup Phia Accused of “Cookie Stuffing” Affiliate Commissions It Didn’t Earn
[5] Phia’s Cookie Stuffing Scandal Exposes a Diligence Blind Spot
[6] Bill Gates’ Daughter’s Startup Phia Suspended from Affiliate Platform Over Cookie-Stuffing Allegations
[7] Accusations of Cookie Stuffing Levelled at Phoebe Gates’ Phia

Keywords: Phia Phoebe Gates, Phia Cookie Stuffing Scandal, Phia App, Cookie Stuffing, Affiliate Fraud, Phoebe Gates And Sophia Kianni, Impact Com Suspension, Ben Edelman, Shopping Browser Extension, Referral Code Hijacking, PayPal Honey Lawsuit, Venture Capital Diligence