Phia, the shopping browser extension co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, has been suspended from Impact.com, a leading affiliate and influencer marketing platform. The suspension follows a Bloomberg investigation that found the company engaged in cookie stuffing — a form of affiliate fraud where Phia claimed credit for purchases its extension did not actually influence TechCrunch.

According to Bloomberg's reporting from July 9, 2026, when users shopped through Phia's extension at online retailers, the software would silently open a background tab during checkout. That background process would override referral codes already attached to the transaction from other affiliates and inject Phia's own tracking cookie instead, positioning Phia to collect commission on sales it had no role in driving Bloomberg. Independent consultants and a Phia competitor corroborated the pattern.

Phia told Bloomberg it had already fixed the issue, and Bloomberg's follow-up verification confirmed the cookie-stuffing behavior had stopped. TechCrunch reached out to Phia for comment and received no response.

Phia launched in 2025 when Gates was 23 years old. The company has raised $43.5 million total from investors — more than the approximately $35 million reported at its January 2026 funding round TechCrunch. High-profile backers include Kim Kardashian and Hailey Bieber, which has given the shopping tool outsized media attention for a company in this crowded category.

Phia's core product scans retailers for the lowest prices on items and surfaces discount codes at checkout. Like most shopping-extension tools, it operates on affiliate marketing: Phia earns commission when a user completes a purchase the platform is credited with driving. That commission model is what makes cookie stuffing financially attractive, and it mirrors the mechanism at the heart of an ongoing lawsuit against Honey, PayPal's shopping extension, which faced identical allegations.

Cookie stuffing itself is not new. The technical method — where a last-click cookie at the moment of purchase overrides earlier referrals — predates the current generation of browser-extension shopping tools by more than a decade. In affiliate marketing, the last-click model means whichever cookie is present when the purchase happens gets the credit, regardless of which affiliate actually encouraged the buy. A background tab that fires after a user has already navigated to checkout can silently claim that credit without having driven any traffic to the site. Platforms like Impact.com exist partly to catch this kind of behavior, and suspension is the standard enforcement step once a violation is confirmed.

This is not the first time Phia's data practices have drawn scrutiny. Fortune reported in November 2025 that the app was collecting more user information than its stated purpose of tracking fashion preferences would justify Fortune. The cookie-stuffing findings, taken together with that earlier report, suggest a pattern in which Phia's technical implementation has run ahead of or in tension with the transparency it has claimed to users and retail partners.

Shopping extensions occupy a structurally risky position. They sit in the browser at the exact moment a purchase decision is completed, with privileged access to the checkout flow. That proximity is the entire value proposition — comparison pricing and discount discovery only work if the tool can see and interact with the transaction. But it also creates the technical opportunity for exactly the kind of last-click override Bloomberg documented. The Honey litigation made clear this is not a one-company problem; it is a category-level risk that regulators and ad networks should monitor more systematically rather than respond to case by case.

For retailers and other affiliates whose referral credit was displaced by Phia's cookie, the damage appears in lost commission revenue, though neither Bloomberg nor TechCrunch has estimated the total sums. For Phia, the immediate consequence is the Impact.com suspension, which closes off a monetization channel while the platform reviews whether the fix Phia claims to have made is genuine. Whether the suspension is lifted, and under what conditions, will likely depend on Impact.com's own audit of Phia's remediation.