Bloomberg found Phia’s browser extension was silently inserting its own affiliate code at checkout, potentially taking credit for sales it did not drive in a practice known as cookie stuffing.
Tests across more than 50 websites with Capital One Shopping and researcher Ben Edelman showed the tool opened a background tab and overrode legitimate publisher referrals, violating many affiliate-network policies.
Within 24 hours of learning of the issue, Phia said a recent code release had caused misattributions for a subset of users and that it had fixed the problem; Bloomberg’s retest found the automatic referral claim had stopped.
The allegation hits a fast-growing New York startup launched in 2025 that has logged hundreds of thousands of downloads and reached about a $185 million valuation after raising more than $43 million.