# Bill Gates’ Daughter Is in Trouble: Inside the Phia Cookie-Stuffing Scandal

> Source: https://buzzwiredaily.com/phoebe-gates-phia-cookie-stuffing-coldfusion/
> Author: Ronald Jeferson
> Published: 2026-10-15
> Modified: 2026-10-15

A 17-minute documentary from ColdFusion, one of YouTube’s biggest tech channels, is pulling the curtain back on the trouble around Phoebe Gates: the 23-year-old daughter of Bill Gates, her 185-million-dollar AI shopping startup Phia, and the cookie-stuffing scheme that Bloomberg says ran for 209 days. The video, “Bill Gates’ Daughter is in Trouble,” landed Wednesday and has already cleared 175,000 views.

[Phoebe Gates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebe_Gates) is the youngest of Bill and Melinda Gates’ three children. She graduated from Stanford in 2024 and built Phia with her roommate Sophia Kianni: an AI shopping tool that scans 40,000 stores, auto-applies discount codes and surfaces secondhand deals. Launched in April 2025, Phia raised 43.5 million dollars, crossed half a million downloads, landed on TIME’s Best Inventions of 2025 list and climbed to a 185-million-dollar valuation. In the film she is blunt about the pressure of the surname. “For me, yes, I feel that pressure 100%,” she says. “But like what a privilege to feel that.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8CVqDKeOKk

![](https://buzzwiredaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/phoebe-gates-fraud-accusations.webp)The FRAUD ACCUSATIONS segment. Video still, courtesy ColdFusion.

Then Bloomberg looked under the hood. Reporters, joined by affiliate-fraud researcher Ben Edelman, tested Phia’s browser extension across more than 50 retail sites and found classic cookie stuffing: the extension planted Phia’s referral cookie into purchases it had nothing to do with, using a hidden background tab at checkout, a click-trigger on its own pop-up, and a passive trigger that refreshed the cookie every two hours. Bloomberg first asked questions on July 7. Phia switched the features off that same day and called it a coding error caught “within the last 24 hours.”

The follow-up in August was worse. Bloomberg obtained a screenshot of an internal dashboard showing the feature was no bug at all. It was named “enable coupon autodrop,” it had a remote toggle, and it ran from December 10, 2025 to July 7, 2026, straight through the holiday shopping season and a 35-million-dollar raise. Reported internal messages show Gates asking her team to confirm the “Auto Pop for Cookie Drop” was live “on all sites” to monetize “all GMV.” When the features went off, daily revenue reportedly collapsed from around 80,000 dollars to between 10,000 and 28,000. A company data scientist estimated cookie stuffing accounted for roughly half the merchandise value Phia claimed credit for in June. Impact.com suspended the startup from its affiliate marketplace, and coverage has raised [federal wire fraud questions](https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/bill-gates-daughter-faces-federal-150814000.html), a statute that carries up to 20 years per count. No charges have been announced.

ColdFusion frames Phia beside PayPal’s Honey, which is being sued in federal court over similar referral practices. It lands in a cycle already crowded with fraud sagas, from a [200,000-dollar celebrity real estate scam](https://buzzwiredaily.com/betty-idol-busted-200k-real-estate-scam/) to [25-million-dollar childcare fraud probes](https://buzzwiredaily.com/dhs-raids-minneapolis-25m-childcare-fraud-uncovered/). The Gates name was supposed to be the shield. The Bloomberg receipts turned it into a magnifying glass instead. Watch the full breakdown above.

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**Citation:**
Ronald Jeferson (2026). Bill Gates’ Daughter Is in Trouble: Inside the Phia Cookie-Stuffing Scandal. *BuzzWireDaily - Gossip, Gangsters & Blockbuster Buzz*. Retrieved from https://buzzwiredaily.com/phoebe-gates-phia-cookie-stuffing-coldfusion/