Phoebe Gates asked in a December 18 Slack message to confirm that auto pop for cookie drop was live on all sites with a coupon. later reported that Phia claimed commissions on sales it did not drive, and internal messages suggested she and Sophia Kianni knew about the cookie stuffing practice for at least seven months.
The extension was described as a personal shopping assistant browser extension that earns commission when a shopper uses it to buy something. Ben Edelman told that “The most fundamental requirement in affiliate marketing is that commission is only paid if a user clicks,” a standard that Phia’s reported setup appears to have bypassed.
and Phia
reported on July 9 that the extension opened a background tab and dropped its own cookie when users made a sale, overriding legitimate referrals. After confronted Phia, a spokesperson blamed technical anomalies and said the team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and resolve the issue.
The Slack message from Phoebe Gates went beyond a routine product note. She wrote that the goal was to confirm they were monetizing on all gross merchandise volume, while Sophia Kianni replied, “Whatever we can do to keep these cookies dropping will be amazing thank you.”
Ariel Givner and US law
Ariel Givner said the conduct is typically treated as federal wire fraud in US courts. She said Gates could face a “max penalty of up to 20 years prison + fines/restitution.”
That legal exposure sits alongside an older cookie stuffing case involving Shawn Hogan. eBay sued him in 2008 for defrauding it and its affiliates in a cookie stuffing scheme, and he was sentenced in 2014 to five months in federal prison after being found to have defrauded eBay for an alleged $28 million in marketing fees.
The unresolved issue is whether Phia intentionally used the cookie-drop feature to capture commissions, or whether the disputed behavior was a technical anomaly. The Slack messages push the story past a software complaint and into the question of who knew what, and when, about how commissions were being generated.
