San Francisco Shuts Down Viral Website That Tracked Parking Cops in Real Time

A website designed to help San Francisco drivers dodge parking tickets went viral this week, only to be shut down by city officials within hours of its launch.

The tool, called ‘Find My Parking Cops’, was created by software engineer Riley Walz. It worked similarly to Apple’s Find My Friends, but instead of locating people, it tracked parking enforcement officers in near real-time, as first reported by Tom’s Hardware (TH).

The app would retrieve locations of tickets that had just been issued, by extracting data from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) website. The app displayed officer initials together with their current locations and a ranking system, showing which officers had issued the most valuable fines. One officer was shown collecting over $20,000 in a single day, as reported by TechSpot.

Walz posted on X:

I reverse engineered the San Francisco parking ticket system. I can see every ticket seconds after it’s written

So I made a website. Find My Friends? AVOID THE PARKING COPS. pic.twitter.com/67MOWVMleF

— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) September 23, 2025

They can even write custom notes on the tickets pic.twitter.com/AWqAAXpHWl

— Riley Walz (@rtwlz) September 23, 2025

Walz discovered that ticket numbers followed a predictable pattern, usually increasing by 11, except when the last digit was 6, in which case the next jump was 4. The system had a security flaw which let him carry out automatic citation scraping operations for thousands of cases, as noted by TechSpot.

The website obtained rapid popularity because it received more than 50,000 visitors during its first few hours of operation, reported TechSport. On the app, users could see fines for street cleaning, hill-parking violations, expired meters, and more, reported 404Media.

But the city reacted swiftly. At 2:34 p.m. Tuesday, the SFMTA altered its website to block access, making parking citations invisible to the public, reported the San Francisco Standard. “When our staff’s safety, and personal information of people who have received parking citations, is at risk, we must act on that swiftly,” an SFMTA spokesperson said, as reported by TechSport.

Walz insists he isn’t “pro or anti parking cop,” but wanted to expose how predictable city systems are, as reported by SF Standard. While he briefly found a workaround, the app has since been unstable, as noted by 404Media.