A New Website To Report Bribes
An Indian BTech student has created a new website that lets people anonymously report incidents in which they were allegedly asked to pay a bribe at a government office.
Called Bribes.fyi, the platform is designed as a crowdsourced public database where users can share details of alleged bribery demands and see reports from other parts of India.
The website was created by Aryan Nishad, a BTech student at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, and went live in July 2026.
How Bribes.fyi Works
The concept is simple.
A user can submit details about an alleged bribe demand, including the government department involved, the city, the amount allegedly demanded and what the payment was supposedly required for.
Users can also indicate whether they actually paid the bribe or refused to pay it.
The submission is then published anonymously, with identifying information removed.
Bribes Mapped Across India
The platform does more than simply collect complaints.
Bribes.fyi organises reports by department, city and state, allowing users to explore where alleged bribery incidents are being reported.
It also includes a map showing reported incidents across India.
At the time of the latest reports, the platform had recorded around 616 reports across 251 cities.
The website itself cautions that the numbers represent reports submitted by users and should not be interpreted as an official measurement of corruption in India.
Police Department Tops The Reports
Among the reports currently listed on the platform, the Police department accounts for the largest number.
It is followed by the RTO, Revenue and Land Records departments, Passport offices and Municipal Corporations.
The platform also tracks whether people paid or refused the alleged bribe.
Interestingly, around 38% of reported incidents were marked as cases where users refused to pay.
Built Using AI
The website’s development is also an interesting part of the story.
Based on its design and development style, reports suggest that the student likely used AI-assisted “vibe coding” to build the platform.
This highlights how generative AI is increasingly allowing individual students and developers to create functional public-interest platforms without needing a large development team.
What might previously have required designers, developers, database engineers and significant funding can now potentially be built by a small team or even a single technically capable individual.
Turning Individual Complaints Into Data
The bigger idea behind Bribes.fyi is to transform individual experiences into publicly visible patterns.
One person being asked for a bribe may appear to be an isolated incident.
Hundreds of similar reports from the same department or city, however, could reveal patterns that deserve closer attention.
The platform therefore attempts to create a kind of crowdsourced corruption map for India.
But There Is A Major Limitation
The platform’s data cannot automatically be treated as proof that a particular department or official is corrupt.
The reports are submitted by users and are not necessarily independently verified.
The website itself acknowledges that its database represents a self-selected sample of reported experiences.
This distinction is important because anonymous platforms can potentially contain inaccurate, exaggerated or even deliberately false allegations.
Can AI And Crowdsourcing Fight Corruption?
Bribes.fyi represents an interesting intersection of AI, crowdsourcing and civic technology.
The platform does not directly investigate allegations or punish officials.
Instead, its goal is to make people’s experiences visible and create a searchable dataset that could reveal patterns that are otherwise difficult to see.
If the database grows significantly, it could potentially become a useful source of information for journalists, researchers, citizens and policymakers.
One Student, One Big Idea
The most striking aspect of Bribes.fyi may be how simple the underlying concept is.
Instead of allowing people to quietly absorb the cost of an alleged bribe, the platform gives them a place to record what happened.
Whether it can evolve into a reliable nationwide corruption-monitoring tool remains to be seen.
But it demonstrates how one student armed with AI and a simple idea can build a platform capable of turning thousands of individual experiences into publicly visible data.
Summary
An Indian BTech student, Aryan Nishad, has created Bribes.fyi, an AI-assisted crowdsourced platform where Indians can anonymously report alleged bribe demands at government offices. Users can submit the department, city, amount and purpose of the alleged payment and indicate whether they paid or refused. The platform organises reports by department, city and state and includes a map of reported incidents. It cautions that the data is self-selected and should not be treated as an official corruption measure.
