A shopping app co-founded by the daughter of one of America’s most recognizable tech billionaires has landed at the center of a fraud allegation that internal company records may not support the company’s own public timeline.
Phoebe Gates, daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, built the app Phia alongside co-founder Sophia Kianni.
The platform promises shoppers an edge at checkout by surfacing discount codes through a browser extension.
Retailers pay Phia a commission every time a shopper completes a purchase after using the extension. That commission structure forms the financial backbone of the company’s business model.
Bloomberg’s investigation, however, uncovered a different story unfolding behind the scenes. Sources familiar with internal communications say the extension was quietly claiming credit for purchases it never actually influenced.
The technique at the center of the allegations is called cookie stuffing, a method in which a tracking file is dropped into a customer’s checkout session without any real involvement from the company benefiting from it.
Once that cookie lands, a retailer’s tracking system can mistakenly credit the sale to Phia, triggering a commission payment the company did not earn.
Bloomberg reported that Gates and Kianni had known about the practice since December 2025, months earlier than the company previously admitted publicly.
The outlet cited internal Slack messages exchanged between the founders as evidence.
Those internal records stand in direct conflict with a statement Phia’s spokesperson gave Bloomberg back in July, which framed the discovery as recent and unexpected.
The spokesperson said at the time, “As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”
That explanation described a company reacting swiftly to fresh news, not one managing a problem its founders had allegedly tracked internally for months beforehand.
The financial scope of the alleged fraud is significant.
An internal Slack message attributed to a Phia data scientist, dated July 7, estimated that cookie stuffing accounted for 51 percent of the sales the app claimed credit for throughout June 2026.
That percentage means more than half of the company’s reported June sales volume may have stemmed from purchases the app played no real role in generating.
Facing the fallout from Bloomberg’s reporting, Phia issued a fresh statement to multiple news outlets, this time acknowledging a specific date for when the problematic features were pulled.
The spokesperson stated, “Any features causing misattributions were immediately removed over a month ago on July 7.”
Phia further said the company is now working to reverse fraudulent transactions with its brand partners who were affected by the misattributed commissions.
The company also announced plans to bring on a head of compliance, a hire intended to guard against similar issues resurfacing down the road.
One detail stood out by its absence from Phia’s most recent statement: the company did not directly address whether Gates and Kianni personally knew about the cookie stuffing before it became public knowledge.
That omission has left a central question in Bloomberg’s reporting unanswered by the company itself, even as Phia moves to clean up the financial fallout with its retail partners.
Gates has drawn public attention throughout her business ventures partly due to her father’s stature as one of the most prominent figures in American technology.
Kianni, her co-founder, has built her own public profile alongside Gates as the two worked to position Phia within the crowded price-comparison app market.
The gap between the company’s internal Slack history and its public statements now sits at the heart of the unfolding controversy surrounding the app.
Bloomberg’s account relied on individuals described only as people with knowledge of the matter, without naming them directly in its published report.
No public comment from either Gates or Kianni has directly addressed the claim that they were personally aware of the fraudulent sales attribution as early as December.
The discrepancy between what the company told the public in July and what internal messages allegedly reveal continues to shape how the story is being received.
