Bribes.fyi collected anonymous accounts of alleged bribe demands for six weeks, then shut down and said the data would eventually go.
On 2 July 2026, a 20-year-old engineering student in Delhi put a website online. It asked one question. Had anyone at a government office asked them for a bribe? Six weeks later Bribes.fyi was gone, and its makers said the reports would be deleted.
What Bribes.fyi Actually Did
Aryan Nishad built the site while studying for a B.Tech at Maharaja Agrasen Institute of Technology, Delhi. Manish Sahani, of Amazon, handled product and strategy.
The site called itself a free, crowdsourced platform. A user could file a report in a minute without an account. They entered the department, city, amount allegedly demanded, purpose, and whether they paid or refused.
Bribes.fyi then grouped the reports by department, city and state. By mid-August it was displaying 616 reports from 251 cities.
Five Million Requests in Two Days
Links spread across social media and news coverage in the second week of August. Sahani said the platform took more than five million requests, and around 200,000 new users, in 48 hours.
It went offline on 18 August, promising to return shortly. The following week, though, the team called the break indefinite and said submissions would not reopen.
The Reasons the Makers Gave
The team called the shutdown a voluntary precaution against misuse, not a response to any complaint. They also said the recorded data would eventually go.
Nishad and Sahani wrote that they were building legal and financial infrastructure for it, and asked publicly whether any lawyers or chartered accountants would help. Separately, Nishad asked people to stop circulating his name and photograph.
Aniruddha Malpani, an angel investor who had given Nishad a Rs 30,000 grant, told ThePrint he did not know why the site went down. He said such a platform has to comply with the Prevention of Corruption Act.
What an Official Complaint Requires
A report on a crowdsourced site is not a complaint in law. The Central Vigilance Commission handles complaints against central government employees. It wants a name, a full postal address and specific details, and it acts only after verifying the complainant is genuine.
Its 2023 annual report recorded 74,203 corruption complaints. It disposed of 66,373, while 7,830 stayed pending.
The Wise Take
The most useful number is the gap between five million visits and 616 reports. Interest in the subject is very large. The willingness to file something with a name on it is smaller. Anonymity made Bribes.fyi easy to use, and it also kept every entry outside the formal system, where a complaint needs a named person behind it. India already has channels for reporting a bribe demand, including one built to protect a complainant’s identity. So the site did not reveal a shortage of channels. It showed how many people will describe an experience only when nothing is asked of them in return.
