Investigations into Phoebe Gate’s personal shopping assistant revealed dubious practices from the Phia browser extension.
Daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’, Phoebe Gates’, and her business partner, Sophia Kianni, have been accused of affiliate fraud.
The pair own personal shopping assistant and browser extension Phia, which allegedly claimed credit for online sales it didn’t actually drive through a practice known as ‘cookie stuffing’, a Bloomberg investigation has found.
Phia is an advertising start-up, which presents as a ‘personal shopping assistant’, helping users get the lowest prices on clothes and fashion accessories.
However, an independent researcher and consultant who has studied affiliate marketing, tested over 50 sites using the Phia mobile browser extension and found it covertly opened a background tab during the checkout process and injected its own referral code.
This would then override the legitimate referrals from other publishers.
Researcher Ben Eldelman said: “The most fundamental requirement in affiliate marketing is that commission is only paid if a user clicks. The rules don’t allow fake clicks, simulated clicks, imaginary clicks or hypothetical clicks. Only a real click will do.”
By replacing other referrer’s unique codes, Phia was breaking industry rules, which prohibit cookies stuffing or taking credit for other platform’s sale – many retailers and major affiliate network’s terms of service.
A similar investigation run by Capital One highlighted findings in its own testing regarding ‘cookie stuffing’ and fake clicks – which it disclosed to Phia.
Phia reportedly acknowledged the issue and has said it is fixed.
A spokesperson from Phia told Bloomberg: “Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users. As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.”
Impact.com confirmed it has suspended Phia’s account,as it identified behaviour, which was “inconsistent with [our] platform policies”.
Phia is not the only affiliate firm to come under fire for bad practice recently. PayPal-owned browser extension Honey faces an ongoing class-action lawsuit in which it is alleged to have ‘hijacked’ affiliate links and stole commission from affiliate marketers.
