You might assume that Bill Gates’ 23-year-old daughter, Phoebe Gates, is the final boss of all nepo babies due to her zillionaire dad. But she’s long insisted that her e-commerce startup, Phia, will succeed with “no ties to my privilege or my last name.”
That goal just got harder than ever with the revelation that Phia has been taking credit for sales it didn’t drive — a practice that could land her in serious legal jeopardy, now that damning internal Slack channel messages obtained by Bloomberg suggest that both Gates and fellow cofounder Sophia Kianni knew they were involved in the scheme for at least seven months.
Cookie stuffing is a deceptive tactic in online marketing in which affiliates — marketers who drive traffic to brands and take a cut from sales — encourage consumers to buy products by crafting special links, which are “stuffed” with cookies that track how the consumer was originally referred to the site. These affiliates then claim commissions for sales they never drove, something that’s “typically treated as federal wire fraud in US courts,” as corporate attorney Ariel Givner pointed out in a tweet responding to Bloomberg‘s reporting.
There’s precedent. A top eBay affiliate, run by tech founder Shawn Hogan, was sued by the online auction site in 2008 for defrauding it and its affiliates in a cookie stuffing scheme. In 2014, Hogan was sentenced to five months in federal prison after being found to have defrauded eBay for an alleged $28 million in marketing fees.
