Bill Gates' daughter could face up to 20 years in prison

Bill Gates' daughter could face up to 20 years in prison

Phoebe, the daughter of American billionaire Bill Gates, could face up to 20 years in prison, according to Ariel Givner, an American intellectual property lawyer.

23-year-old Phoebe runs her company Phia with Sophia Kian. The company is accused of using fake cookies to get commissions from purchases, and Phoebe and Kian are said to have been aware of the situation.

According to Givner, "Usually, American courts treat this as federal network fraud. The maximum penalty is up to 20 years in prison, as well as fines and restitution."

According to Bloomberg sources, Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kian knew about the use of fake cookies for at least seven months.

Phia is a digital service designed to find profitable offers. If a user goes to the seller’s website through the app and makes a purchase, the service charges a certain amount of commission for it.

However, without informing the user, the app continued to link its data to each purchase, regardless of how the user entered the platform. As a result, Phia’s founders were unjustifiably charged commissions even for transactions that were not made through their app.

Phia called this a software error and said that it only learned about the problem the day journalists contacted the company.

“This contradicts reports that startup executives had been aware of the problem since at least December,” the Bloomberg article says.

After the bug was fixed, the company’s average daily revenue dropped from $80,000 to $10,000–28,000. According to internal Phia employee correspondence, in June the share of goods for which the company illegally received commissions was 51 percent.

"Phia, which raised $35 million in venture capital from several prominent investors in January, has already started returning some of its commissions to retailers," the report says.

Cookies are files designed to identify a site user and track their activity on web portal pages.