Gates, Bill Gates’ daughter, co-founded the app with Sofia Chianni.
According to multiple reports, the AI-powered shopping plugin Phia used a tactic known as cookie stuffing to attach affiliate codes to sales it didn’t actually facilitate. Launched last spring, Fia was co-founded by Bill Gates’ daughter Phoebe Gates and Sofia Chianni. According to a study by researcher Ben Edelman, bloomberg and Capital One Shopping have both reportedly discovered instances where browser extensions were claiming fake click referrals and taking credit for sales for which other publishers should have received a commission.
Edelman provided a detailed breakdown of how this works, accompanied by a video showing how Fear’s “affiliate links load invisibly in a second tab” on iOS after visiting a merchant’s website. It’s worth a read.
Fear blamed the problems uncovered in the investigation on a bug. in a statement to bloomberg“In the past 24 hours, we became aware that our codebase was causing incorrect attribution from some users in a recent release. As soon as we were notified, our team worked through the night to identify, mitigate, and subsequently resolve the issue,” a company spokesperson said. The functionality that enables all of this was rolled out in December 2025, with Edelman and bloomberg Both were reported.
