Phia scandal due diligence explained

Phia, the shopping startup founded by Bill Gates, and Sophia Kianni, has been accused of a practice known as "cookie stuffing," which may have helped the product receive commissions and credit for sales it did not actually generate, according to a Bloomberg report. A lot of people are asking the question whoa, shouldn't the investors have done due diligence? Phia, the shopping startup and uncovered that this company was using cookie stuffing. Cookie stuffing was actually happening on iOS only using misattributions from a subset of users. I disagree that the problem was limited to a "recent release" of Phia. There have been numerous intervening releases, making it difficult to characterize this as a problem. Thus, a user who tests only on desktop would never see these forced clicks. In my experience, many affiliate fraud testers test desktop only. That explains why this wasn't promptly noticed. Phia first shipped this feature in version 1.9.33 of its app, published on December 13, 2025. Nonetheless, if you're interested in this, go to the primary source. Ben walks through the code review that he did. Misattributions from a subset of users. I disagree that the problem was limited to a "recent release" of Phia. There have been numerous intervening releases, making it difficult to characterize this as a problem. Cookie stuffing was actually happening on iOS only using misattributions from a subset of users. I think this is really important because Ben, who has been doing investigative work into this category for 20 years, said that he had never seen anything like this. He had never seen cookie stuffing done on iOS only. He commented as such on my LinkedIn post, basically saying that traditionally when cookie stuffing is done, it's done on a desktop. And I think that in a typical Series A due diligence process, which is what this was, you would absolutely do a code review. I'm not expecting Alix Earle to do a code review. I'm not expecting Khloe Kardashian or Kim Kardashian to do code review, but I am expecting Notable Capital, Khosla and major venture firms to do a code review. But I think what's interesting is because cookie stuffing on iOS is novel, it likely could be missed in a typical due diligence process. I do believe that it's the institutional investor's responsibility to do due diligence, to do technology due diligence, to do due diligence. I do not think that investor angel investors who may or may not be celebrities are responsible for that. I think that it makes sense to trust an institutional lead. And I think that it is a gray area in terms of how much due diligence is enough. Due diligence, same thing with technical diligence. I think investors should dig into the technology. But I don't necessarily think that at Series A when the product is very, very young, that investors should think that everyone is doing something nefarious, that they should hire an expert. This is not good for the industry. It's not good for Phia. And I wanna say that I do think that the investors did do diligence and I think that they missed this.