A live map of things that went wrong
Every pin is a real complaint. Most of them were filed with a government agency by someone who had had enough — a bank that lost a payment, a car that shakes at speed, a landlord who never fixed the heat, a party three floors down at two in the morning. We pull them in every day from federal regulators and city 311 lines, work out where they happened, and put them on a map. The rest were dropped by visitors, and you can add yours in about fifteen seconds.
There is no sign-up, no email, and nothing to install. The whole site is one map and one form.
The map loads whatever complaints fall inside your current view, so zooming into your own city shows you your own city. Dense areas collapse into clusters until you zoom in far enough to pull them apart.
Click a pin and the full complaint opens in a side panel — not a two-line summary. The consumer complaints run long: the median is around 1,300 characters and the longest we have seen is over 7,000. You get all of it, in the words it was filed in. 311 records are short by contrast, because a city publishes what the complaint was about and where, but not what the person wrote.
Click Drop a Complaint, type up to 500 characters, pick a category, then either click the map or let your browser share your location. It appears as a pin immediately, alongside everyone else's.
Twelve categories, each with its own color on the map. Pick one and everything else disappears.
Three federal regulators, three city 311 lines, and you. All of it public record. Nothing here is invented or generated.
Complaints Americans filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau about banks, lenders, credit reporting, debt collectors and mortgages. These are the long ones, written in full by the person it happened to.
The CFPB publishes on a lag, so the newest complaint available is usually two to three weeks old.
Safety complaints filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration against recent model years — brakes that failed, screens that went dark, transmissions that let go on a highway.
NHTSA records carry no location field at all, so most of them are deliberately thrown away rather than placed somewhere invented.
Complaints filed with the Federal Communications Commission about phone, internet, TV and radio service — robocalls, billing that does not match the quote, a number that would not port, an outage nobody would explain.
The FCC publishes the issue and the caller's town, not their words, so these read as a category rather than a story. They arrive fast, though: often the same day they were filed.
What people actually call their city about — noise, heat and hot water, rats, illegal parking, potholes, graffiti, abandoned cars. This is the everyday half of the map, and the part no federal complaint form covers.
These are the only scraped pins with real coordinates: the city records the address the complaint is about. San Francisco also publishes the reporter's own description; New York and Chicago do not.
Everything no agency takes a report on, and everywhere the 311 feeds do not reach — which is most of the country. You pick the spot yourself, so it lands exactly where you meant it.
Submitted anonymously and published straight away, with no account and no review queue.
Some pins are exact; most are approximate. The 311 records arrive with the city's own coordinates for the address the complaint is about, so those are as precise as this map gets. The federal ones have no coordinates at all: we read the place name out of the record and scatter the pin around that city, so it sits in the right city and not at the right address. If nothing names a place we drop the complaint rather than guess, which is why there are fewer pins here than there are complaints in the source data. A confidently wrong location is worse than no pin.
Identical wording is not a duplicate pin. Thousands of 311 records read exactly the same — "Noise - Residential: Loud Music/Party" — because the city publishes fixed fields rather than prose. Each one is a different person, a different address, a different night. They are all kept.
A refresh happens once a day. An automated job runs every morning at 09:00 UTC, fetches whatever is new, and skips anything already on the map. Complaints you submit yourself show up the instant you send them.
There is nothing to sign up for. We do not ask for your name or email, and there is no login on this site at all.
A complaint you submit is visible to everyone, immediately and permanently. Do not put anything in it you would not want read — no account numbers, no phone numbers, no names.
If you tap Use My Location, your browser hands over your coordinates for that one submission. Nothing tracks you around the map, and you can skip it entirely by clicking where you want the pin instead.
The Helpful Resources panel points to services relevant to the category you are looking at, and some of those pay a commission. They are marked Ad. They have no effect on which complaints you see.
The map is right here, and it already knows what your neighbors are annoyed about.
Open the map