Crowd-funded anti-bribery portal shuts after amassing 2 lakh users in 48 hrs

NEW DELHI: Bribes.fyi began as a side project and, within 48 hours, clocked 5 million requests and 2 lakh new users. It shut down as suddenly as its meteoric rise took social media by surprise.Built by 20-year-old Delhi BTech student Aryan Nishad, it displayed a neon-red map of India for anonymous reports of alleged bribe demands. By Aug 17, it had logged reports from 253 cities—against police, RTOs, and revenue and land records offices, and passport offices. 37% were, interestingly, marked “refused”, meaning users said they did not pay and still got their work done. The site stressed these were user submissions, not verified cases.The site then abruptly went offline, citing traffic, data security, spam, duplicate entries and misuse. Calling the shutdown voluntary and precautionary, the te