So ColdFusion dropped a video breaking down how Phoebe Gates (Bill and Melinda’s youngest, 23 years old) and her Stanford roommate Sophia Kianni built this AI shopping assistant called Phia. The idea was simple and kinda cool on paper: a browser extension and app that hunts deals, compares prices (especially fashion and resale), finds coupons, and helps you not overpay. It launched in April 2025, pulled in tens of millions in funding, hit a high valuation, got half a million downloads, even made Time’s best inventions list. Phoebe talked about wanting to prove she could build something real on her own, free of the family name and the “lucky kid” label.
Then Bloomberg started poking around in summer 2026. What they found was the extension quietly dropping affiliate tracking cookies on retailer sites (Nike, Gap, Nordstrom and more) even when the user never clicked a Phia coupon or really used the tool. That’s called cookie stuffing — basically claiming credit and commissions for sales you didn’t actually drive. Bloomberg tested it across dozens of sites with help from experts, and a competing tool saw the same thing. There were multiple features doing it: background tabs inserting referral codes, cookies triggering on almost any click, and a “passive” updater refreshing cookies every couple hours.
Phia told Bloomberg it was just a technical bug they only learned about and fixed in the last 24 hours. But the follow-up reporting told a different story. Internal panel screenshots and Slack messages (shared by people inside the company) showed an “activate automatic coupon drop” switch that had been live for more than 200 days, starting back in December 2025 — right through the holiday season and a big fundraising round. Phoebe reportedly messaged the team asking to confirm the auto-cookie feature was working on all coupon sites so they could capture the full merchandise volume. Sophia pushed to keep the cookies dropping even after an engineer flagged compliance issues.
When they finally turned the features off after Bloomberg’s first contact, average daily revenue reportedly fell from around $80,000 down to the $10,000–$28,000 range. One estimate put the stuffing at about 51% of the merchandise value they claimed in June. Impact.com (the affiliate network) suspended them. The company said it would reverse the transactions, hire a compliance officer, and learn from it — but the Slack messages weren’t really addressed.
Lawyers note that cookie stuffing has been treated as federal wire fraud before (with real prison time in past cases), and the statutory max can reach 20 years. No charges have been filed yet, and proving deliberate intent is a high bar. Still, the combination of the long-running feature, the internal messages, and the revenue drop after shutdown is the part that has people talking.
Privilege can open doors and raise money fast. Building something clean that actually earns its commissions the honest way is a different test. This one is still playing out — watch the full ColdFusion breakdown for the details and decide for yourself what the evidence shows.
