Bill Gates's daughter co-founded a shopping app — and it reportedly took credit for sales it didn't make

A Bloomberg investigation published August 11 reported that both founders pushed for software features that claimed credit for sales the app didn’t drive. It is alleged they knew about it for at least seven months.

On July 7, Bloomberg contacted Phia to ask about the problem. The next day, Gates and Kianni’s company publicly said that a software bug was behind the app’s woes and that it had only learned about it “within the last 24 hours.” But Bloomberg’s first story that ran July 9 revealed that Phia’s internal Slack messages go back to December.

How the app was supposed to make money

Phia runs a browser extension that pops up at an online retailer’s checkout. It hunts down discount codes and earns a commission from the retailer whenever a shopper uses said code. It opened background tabs across major affiliate networks.

That action is against the policies of affiliates like Impact.com, Awin and Rakuten. Rakuten’s network policies say the shopper has to click that kind of offer before a cookie is placed, and that merely seeing one doesn’t count.

Proof comes in the form of that cookie, data from the app left in the shopper’s browser history. Phia’s homepage still promises it “automatically applies the best coupon codes at checkout,” and the pop-up carries a “Get coupon” button.

Bloomberg tested the app’s mobile extension on more than 50 websites. At checkout, the app loaded a second tab and dropped its cookie into the transaction, pushing aside the credit belonging to the link that had actually sent the shopper to an online retailer like Nike, the Gap and Nordstrom. Those companies did not respond to Bloomberg’s requests for comment.

Phia’s dashboard listed the behavior as a feature called “enable coupon auto drop.” It was turned on December 10 and left on until July 7, the day Bloomberg called. A second feature, “passive trigger,” ran from October to July, dropping a cookie every two hours on any top-1,000 site where the shopper had previously used Phia.

What the founders reportedly knew

On December 18, Gates noticed Phia’s commissions from Etsy looked low. In an internal Slack channel, she pressed engineers to confirm the cookie was dropping automatically on every site with a coupon. A developer said the pop-up itself was broken, but that when it did appear, cookies were sent even if the shopper didn’t use a coupon. Gates replied, “Regardless we should capture every transaction if the cookie drop was working.”

When Kianni floated setting a cookie on users who dismissed a Phia pop-up, a colleague noted that Google’s Chrome policy bars affiliate cookies on dismiss events. She agreed, then suggested treating the dismissal as an attempted open and rolling it back if anyone complained.