Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates’ shopping app Phia is in damage control mode after revelations that ‘shocked’ many
Phia, the shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is now issuing refunds and reversing transactions after admitting it collected commissions on sales it never actually drove. Business Insider reported that the startup is working with affiliate network Impact.com to correct attributions, and a Phia spokesperson confirmed the company has offered transaction reversals to brands. Impact.com said it is reprocessing every action credited to Phia between June 20 and July 29 that had not yet been paid out, reattributing them to the right publisher or refunding advertisers.The cleanup follows a Bloomberg investigation published on July 9 that found Phia’s mobile browser extension quietly opening a background tab during checkout and injecting its own referral code, overwriting whoever had actually sent the shopper there. Bloomberg tested the extension across more than 50 retail sites, including Walmart, Nike and Zara. In one test, clicking a Nordstrom link from a Wirecutter article triggered a background tab that swapped Wirecutter’s affiliate code for Phia’s.Phia cookie stuffing explained: how fake clicks let a shopping app claim commissions it never earnedThe practice has a name in the industry: cookie stuffing, or forced clicks. Affiliate marketing runs on one rule, that a commission is owed only when a user actually clicks a link and then buys. Independent researcher Ben Edelman, who reviewed Phia’s public code and ran his own tests, found a setting called enable_coupon_auto_drop that fired affiliate links without any user action, usually at the cart or checkout page. Crucially, it was switched on only for iOS users through a server-side feature flag, which is why desktop-only testers missed it for months.Capital One Shopping, which makes a rival extension, reached the same conclusion and emailed retailers with video evidence. Publishers were losing real revenue, the email said, and advertisers were paying for fake clicks.Phia calls it a bug, investigation calls it auto_drop: the December 2025 code that ran for seven monthsPhia has called it a bug. Its spokesperson told Bloomberg the company learned that a recent release was causing misattributions from a subset of users, and that the team worked overnight to fix it. Bloomberg retested after contacting the company on July 7 and found the automatic referral claims had stopped.Edelman disputes the framing. The feature first shipped in version 1.9.33 on December 13, 2025, which puts it in the field for roughly seven months, including the holiday shopping season. A feature named auto_drop that automatically drops affiliate cookies, he argues, is hard to describe as an accident.Impact.com suspends Phia as refunds begin, while Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni say nothingThe stakes are high for a company that has raised $43.5 million from Kleiner Perkins, Khosla Ventures and Notable Capital, plus celebrity backers including Hailey Bieber, Khloe Kardashian, Sydney Sweeney and Sheryl Sandberg. Phia’s app has been downloaded over 1.2 million times in the past year.Impact.com has temporarily suspended Phia from its marketplace, the tool brands use to find new partners, and wants a stretch of clean compliance before reinstating it. Rakuten Advertising says it is investigating. CJ Affiliate told partners it is making reconciliation payments.Gates and Kianni, who promote Phia constantly across social media and host a podcast called The Burnouts, have said nothing publicly.
