Bill Gates' Daughter Faces 20 Years in Prison over Cookie Stuffing
The youngest daughter of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Phoebe Gates, is facing a potential prison sentence of up to 20 years. Her startup is strongly suspected of involvement in a serious online marketing commission fraud scandal. According to reports from Bloomberg and Futurism on Thursday (13/8/2026), Phoebe is believed to have known about the fraudulent practices carried out by her company for months.
Phoebe is the founder of Phia, an e-commerce shopping assistant platform. Phia’s commission mechanism is only legally obtained when a buyer makes a transaction after clicking on their recommendation link. However, it was recently revealed that the platform employed a cookie stuffing method to collect commissions from transactions that did not actually originate from their referrals.
Initially, Phia representatives defended themselves by calling the issue merely a ‘technical problem’ that was promptly fixed within 24 hours. However, leaked internal messages show that Phoebe Gates and her co-founder, Sophia Kianni, had known about the practice since December last year, seven months before it was exposed.
In a message dated 18 December, Phoebe even asked the technical team to ensure the feature ran on all shopping sites so they could earn commissions from the entire transaction value. Her colleague replied that the feature should continue to be run despite warnings that it could potentially violate regulations.
After the feature was disabled, Phia’s daily revenue plummeted from US$80,000 per day to just US$10,000–US$28,000 per day. This means the majority of Phia’s revenue came from the fraudulent practice.
Lawyer Ariel Givner assessed that the practice constitutes a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison, fines, and restitution of all unlawfully obtained funds.
The case also carries irony because one of Phia’s investors is eBay, the same company that once sued a similar fraudster who was sentenced to five months in prison and ordered to pay US$28 million in damages in 2014.
To date, Phia has stated that it has fixed the system and is reviewing all affected transactions, but there has been no official statement regarding the possibility of legal investigation into its founders.
What is the fraudulent cookie stuffing technique?
Cookie stuffing is designed to cheat the transaction recording system for affiliates in e-commerce. The legitimate process works as follows: a buyer clicks on a recommendation link from a website and then purchases an item. The website earns a commission because it directed the buyer there. The commission is only valid if the buyer themselves clicked the link.
What Phia did was fraudulent because buyers never clicked on a link from the company. Buyers shopped directly on the website of their choice. However, Phia’s system secretly stuffed its own tracking cookies onto buyers’ devices while they were shopping.
As a result, the store system believed the buyer came from Phia, so Phia collected commissions on purchases it never actually referred. Commissions should only be paid when there is a genuine service of redirecting the buyer.
Phia took money without doing anything because buyers came to the online store website on their own, and Phia then fraudulently took a portion of the store’s profits. This practice has been recognised by United States courts as financial transaction fraud, because it exploits online systems to steal money belonging to another party.