Bill Gates' daughter could be looking at up to 20 years in prison.
Phoebe Gates, the 23-year-old offspring of the tech billionaire, is caught up in explosive allegations that her digital shopping company Phia engaged in a shady practice called "cookie stuffing" to pocket commissions on sales it never actually drove. As reported, the company she co-founded with Sophia Kianni offered a browser extension promising users better prices and discount codes. But behind the scenes, things were allegedly far more sinister.
Here's how the alleged scam worked. Phia's extension would plant a digital tracking cookie on a shopper's browser, tagging the company as the referral source for purchases. That cookie meant Phia collected a cut from the retailer. The problem? Those cookies were allegedly being dropped even when Phia had absolutely nothing to do with the sale. Free money, essentially, skimmed off major brands.
A Bloomberg investigation published in July blew the lid off the whole operation, naming heavyweight retailers like Nike, Nordstrom, and Gap among the companies getting fleeced. And get this, Phia had just pulled in $30 million from celebrity investors including Hailey Bieber and Kris Jenner. Talk about awkward timing.
The most damning detail might be what happened after Bloomberg exposed the practice. Phia reportedly shut down the questionable features, and their daily revenue nosedived from roughly $80,000 to somewhere between $10,000 and $28,000. That cliff dive strongly suggests a huge chunk of the company's income was tied directly to those disputed tracking cookies.
Then there are the receipts. Bloomberg obtained Slack messages that allegedly show Gates and Kianni knew about the problem for at least seven months. That directly contradicts their claim to investigators that they only became aware of it "within the last 24 hours." One Slack message attributed to Gates from December 18th reportedly discussed expanding automatic cookie drops across all partner sites. "Worried this is an issue across the board," she allegedly wrote, asking to confirm the auto cookie feature was live on every site.
Kianni allegedly proposed planting a cookie every time a user simply closed a Phia pop-up window, though a company spokesperson denied the investigation's claims.
Phia's official response tried to reframe the whole scandal as innocent "misattributions." A spokesperson said the problematic features were yanked on July 7th and that the company is reviewing every transaction and issuing refunds to affected retail partners. They also announced plans to bring on a head of compliance.
No criminal charges have been filed against Gates, Kianni, or the company as of this writing. But legal experts are sounding serious alarms. Attorney Ariel Givner, founder of Givner Law, posted on X that cookie stuffing is typically prosecuted as federal wire fraud in American courts, carrying a potential maximum penalty of 20 years behind bars plus fines and restitution.
So while daddy Gates built his fortune on software, his daughter might have picked up a very different lesson about what code can do.
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