reported that Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni knew for at least seven months that Phia was overstating sales commissions through cookie stuffing, a finding that cuts against the startup’s earlier claim that it had only just learned of the problem. The report puts fresh pressure on the 23-year-old co-founder and on the digital personal shopping assistant she built with Kianni.
The reason the claim landed hard is simple: Phia had told the market in July that it had only learned of the issue within the last 24 hours, yet internal Slack messages and people familiar with the matter indicated that Gates and Kianni were aware of features that dropped cookies into the checkout process even when customers did not use Phia. That matters because cookie stuffing can let a company take credit for sales it did not drive, making commission data look stronger than it really is.
The reported conduct reached back to at least December and involved sales at Nike, Gap and Nordstrom. In June, cookie stuffing accounted for about 51% of the merchandise value Phia claimed credit for selling, showing how much of the company’s reported performance may have depended on the disputed tracking. After the features were disabled in July, average daily revenue reportedly fell from around $80,000 to between $10,000 and $28,000, a sharp drop that suggests the practice was not a side issue but a core part of how the business had been monetizing traffic.
Phia said any features causing misattributions were removed on July 7 and said it was reviewing every transaction, issuing reversals to brand partners and hiring a head of compliance. The company also said it was continuing to connect users with items and offers from thousands of brand partners and would learn from the episode while adding new features such as a digital closet. But the larger question is not whether the startup can patch its system; it is how long its leaders knew the commission data was distorted and what that means for the controls around a company that raised $30 million in 2025 from backers including Hailey Bieber, Kris Jenner and Sara Blakely.
That question now has legal weight. Ariel Givner said cookie stuffing is typically treated as federal wire fraud in US courts and can carry a maximum penalty of up to 20 years in prison, plus fines and restitution. If the reported timeline holds, the issue is no longer just about one startup’s broken attribution model. It is about whether Phia’s founders were fixing a technical problem in public after already knowing what was happening behind the scenes.
