Phoebe Gates' cofounder bragged about creating a fake male assistant to manufacture success in a resurfaced clip as the pair face fraud allegations against their coupon company. 

Sophia Kianni, 24, and Gates, 23, sat down to chat on the popular podcast, Call Her Daddy, in April 2025, where the former revealed she started a fake assistant named Kobe to negotiate higher-paid public speaking gigs in college. 

'I'm like, everyone's going to think I'm a fraud. This is so much money,' she told host, Alex Cooper, about her unique ploy. 

The idea came about when one of her Stanford friends suggested she make a fake male assistant who can negotiate her deals for her. Although Kianni acknowledged the plan was 'psychotic,' she did it anyway, and quickly garnered higher paying gigs. 

'That's so psychotic. You're a genius. I'm going to do that,' she said as Gates laughed and nodded alongside her.  

Kianni even made her actual friend Kobe answer calls to speak with businesses on her behalf to keep the ruse going. 

Eventually, the ploy allowed her to get paid thousands of dollars to speak and have her travel expenses covered as well, she told Cooper.  

'I was so paranoid. I would change the way that Kobe did his grammar to not sound like me. I would capitalize weirdly,' she explained.  

'Then when I had to loop myself back in, I would talk and sign off my emails in a different way. I had a whole elaborate scheme going on.' 

Cooper, who recently announced her pregnancy, marked the move as 'genius,' especially because Kianni made the faux assistant a male as society tends to take men more seriously. 

'The biggest factor that I took from this, which I wouldn't have thought of, is that you made it a man,' Cooper said. 'It was so smart of you to be like I'm going to advocate for myself through a fake man.'

'I engineered it,' Kianni said about her unusual ways to manufacture success. 'You have to create your own luck. That's the reality.' 

When Cooper asked the girls for more business 'hacks,' Gates replied that their methods were 'unhinged.' 

Kianni also shared that she secured scholarships to help pay her Stanford tuition – which cost $74,000 a year when she enrolled in 2021 – by looking up the hashtag journorequest, where journalists post callouts for sources, to get herself in the news to be able to link to publications on her scholarship applications. 

She began speaking about climate change and her work with the UN, where she was appointed an advisor on the topic in 2020, becoming the youngest to ever be named in that position. 

She also started Climate Cardinals, a nonprofit focusing on climate change, in college. 

This move got the attention of a scholarship committee, who reopened their application specifically so she could apply. 

'It was a miracle,' Kianni said on the podcast. 

Now, the pair are in hot water after a Bloomberg investigation found their company, Phia, which helps shoppers find the best deals, has been engaging in 'fake clicks' on retail sites, and claiming their app was driving sales when it wasn't. 

The AI-powered browser extension allegedly registered the 'fake clicks' on retail websites, ultimately claiming commission on sales the company never earned, according to a report from Bloomberg. 

The glitch, which Phia has since fixed, was reportedly introduced to the shopping platform's source code in December.

Phia is an app designed to help shoppers get the best bang for their buck by comparing prices of clothing and accessories from over 40,000 retail and resale sites.

The start-up company works by relying on affiliate revenue, as Phia receives a commission from any sale purchased using their browser extension.

When users discover a clothing item or product through Phia's app and purchase that item through an affiliate link, Phia earns a percentage of the resulting sale.

However, an investigation by Bloomberg, Capital One Shopping, and Ben Edelman, an independent researcher, discovered that Phia's app had opened a background tab and injected its own referral code during the checkout process without any user interaction.

Known as 'cookie stuffing' or attribution fraud, Phia registered what was called 'fake clicks' on retailers' websites, allowing it to replace another referrer's unique code with its own and claim commission for sales it never earned.

The practice is largely considered a violation across many digital platforms' policies. Impact.com, a major affiliate network, told Bloomberg it suspended Phia's account after identifying behavior in its extension that was 'inconsistent with our platform policies.'

A spokesperson for Phia acknowledged the issue and told Bloomberg it had been fixed.

'Within the last 24 hours, we were made aware that in a recent release our codebase was causing misattributions from a subset of users,' the statement read, noting that the source code was introduced to Phia's platform in December.

'As soon as we were notified, our team worked overnight to identify, mitigate, and has since resolved the issue.'

The company also said that Phia is audited regularly by its affiliate network partners and has 'always maintained compliance.' Researchers then retested Phia's browser extension in July and found it had stopped automatically claiming a referral click.

Gates is the youngest daughter of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and his ex-wife Melinda French Gates. In April 2025, she launched Phia alongside Kianni, her former Stanford roommate. 

In just one week after launch, Phia was ranked number 21 on the App Store and reached 20,000 downloads. Three months later, they reached over 370,000 downloads.

By September 2025, Phia surpassed a reported 500,000 downloads and received $8 million in funding. That was followed by another $35 million in funding last January, valuing the company at $185 million just one year after launch.

Phia also boasts an impressive list of celebrity investors, including Kris Jenner, Hailey Bieber, SPANX founder Sara Blakely, Fanatics founder Michael Rubin and former Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.

The Daily Mail has reached out to the founders for comment.