Phoebe and her friend, Sophia Kianni, launched the web service in 2025 as a competitor to similar services like Honey and Capital One Shopping. These services typically collect a commission from retailers that make the resulting sale.
However, according to a Bloomberg investigation, even without user interaction, Phia could open a background tab and inject its own referral code, overriding legitimate referrals from other publishers and collecting the commission.
A Phia spokesperson acknowledged the issue and said it has been fixed, telling 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.”
Bloomberg retested Phia’s browser extension after reaching out to the company on July 7 and found it had indeed stopped automatically claiming referral clicks.