Phia accused of cookie stuffing in affiliate marketing probe

Phia, the shopping startup founded in 2025 by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, faced allegations that its browser extension used cookie stuffing to grab affiliate commissions on sales it did not generate. The allegations became public on July 10, 2026, and Phia was suspended from impact.com after the issue surfaced.

Cookie stuffing is simple to describe and troubling in practice: a service places or overwrites an affiliate tracking cookie without a shopper’s meaningful click, then claims credit for the sale. In affiliate marketing, that credit is supposed to go to the publisher that actually drove the customer to the retailer. When another party takes the commission, the wrong publisher loses revenue, retailers lose clean attribution, and a system built on trust becomes harder to police.

Independent testing by Bloomberg, affiliate-marketing researcher Ben Edelman and Capital One Shopping reportedly found that Phia’s extension could open a hidden or background checkout tab, inject its own tracking code and overwrite a legitimate referrer’s code during checkout. That sequence would allow Phia to claim commissions on purchases it did not influence and redirect revenue away from the sites that genuinely sent the shopper. Edelman wrote on July 9, 2026, that he had been looking at multiple forms of misconduct by Phia and said his testing pointed to possible affiliate-network rule violations and misleading public statements.

The mechanics matter because affiliate networks generally require an affirmative user action before a tracking cookie is set or a commission is claimed. Edelman said Phia activated an auto_drop setting through a feature flag that gave the company server-side control over which devices received forced clicks. That kind of control, if used to assign credit without clear consent, cuts against the basic rules that make affiliate commerce work.

A Phia spokesperson told Bloomberg the practice had been corrected. The company now faces scrutiny not just over one tracking method, but over the broader growth-at-all-costs culture that can follow fast-moving consumer-tech startups when commission revenue becomes part of the business model.

The pressure lands at a delicate moment for Phia. The company raised $35 million in January 2026, and later coverage placed its total funding at $43.5 million. Backed by that capital, Phia has been positioned as a fast-growing shopping tool, but the affiliate allegations put trust and compliance at the center of its next test.