When the App That "Saved You Money" Was Actually Stealing Commissions From Other Affiliates

When the App That "Saved You Money" Was Actually Stealing Commissions From Other Affiliates

Imagine you did all the research yourself, found the best deal on your own, and headed to checkout — only to have a background process silently swipe the sales credit away from whoever actually helped you get there. That is exactly what shopping startup Phia stands accused of doing, and the implications for anyone running or relying on affiliate marketing are serious.

Phia, the AI-powered shopping app co-founded by Phoebe Gates (daughter of Bill Gates) and Sophia Kianni, raised more than $40 million in funding and attracted celebrity investors including Kim Kardashian and Hailey Bieber. The startup positioned itself as a kind of Google Flights for shopping, helping users find the lowest prices across retailers and applying discount codes at checkout. Phia monetized through affiliate commissions, earning a cut whenever a purchase was made through its platform. That is a legitimate model used across the industry. The problem, per a Bloomberg investigation, is how those commissions were allegedly being collected.

According to findings from Bloomberg, an independent consultant, and a competitor, Phia's browser extension was accused of "cookie stuffing" — a practice where the app would open a hidden background tab during a user's checkout process and inject its own affiliate referral code, overriding codes from other affiliates who had legitimately referred the customer. That means if a shopper arrived at a retailer through a trusted source like Wirecutter, or through any other affiliate program they had genuinely engaged with, Phia could quietly claim the commission on that sale instead. The fallout was swift: Phia was suspended from Impact.com, one of the leading affiliate and influencer marketing platforms. After Bloomberg flagged the behavior, a Phia spokesperson said the necessary fixes had been made, and Bloomberg confirmed the issue appeared resolved — though it remained unclear whether that would be enough to repair relationships with retailers and affiliate partners.

For small and mid-size business owners who depend on affiliate marketing, this story is a wake-up call about the integrity of your attribution data. Affiliate marketing only works when the commission model is trustworthy, and cookie stuffing corrupts that trust at the foundation. If a shady tool is claiming credit for sales your legitimate affiliates or marketing channels drove, you are overpaying the wrong partners and potentially underpaying or losing the ones who are actually performing for you. This is not a theoretical risk. Phia is not the first company accused of this practice — Honey, the popular browser extension owned by PayPal, remains the subject of an ongoing class action lawsuit over similar allegations. These tools are widespread, and many of your customers likely have them installed.

The broader lesson here for business owners is that affiliate attribution is not passive. Your marketing dollars, your commission payouts, and your understanding of which channels are driving revenue can all be distorted by third-party tools operating in the background of your customers' browsers. If your affiliate program is showing results that seem too clean, too broad, or disconnected from the traffic patterns you can see in your analytics, those are signals worth investigating. A tool claiming last-click credit on a sale is not automatically the tool that earned it.

This is also a trust issue with your customers. Phia was marketed as a tool that helped shoppers save money. If users discover that the app was silently redirecting commissions in the background, without their knowledge, that erodes confidence not just in Phia but in AI-powered shopping tools broadly. As a business owner deploying AI tools in your own customer experience, the standard has to be transparency. Your customers need to know how the tools you use work and whose interests they serve.

This week, log into your affiliate platform and pull a last-click attribution report for your top-performing affiliates. Cross-reference those results against your own first-party analytics — specifically, check whether the traffic sources your platform reports match what you see in your site analytics for the same sales. A significant mismatch, especially one where browser extension-type affiliates are claiming outsized credit, is a sign you may have a cookie stuffing problem affecting your program's accuracy and your budget.

In AI-powered marketing, the tools you trust with your customer journey and your revenue attribution need to earn that trust with transparency and verifiable results.

Originally inspired by: Phia accused of 'cookie stuffing,' taking affiliate credit on purchases it didn't earn (https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/10/phia-accused-of-cookie-stuffing-taking-affiliate-credit-on-purchases-it-didnt-earn/) See how Leads to Conversion can help you build a cleaner, smarter affiliate and AI marketing strategy. Get your free AI audit