Torrance Airport Complaint Fraud

The news website aviationa2z.com reported on 7/14/2025 that:

• Investigations have shown that many airport noise complaints originate from a handful of residents, and in some cases, just one person.
• These individuals often use automated systems or mobile apps that repeatedly submit pre-written noise complaints with minimal user input.

The article goes on to report that major airports spend millions of dollars annually to respond to noise complaints from a very small number of individuals. For example:

• Denver (DEN) reported 4 individuals made 96% of the complaints;
• Dulles (IAD) saw one individual make 78% of the complaints --6,852 in one year;
• Los Angeles (LAX) saw one individual make over 50% of the complaints; 3 individuals accounted for 88% of the complaints.

Torrance Airport is not immune from this fraudulent activity. Our city spends hundreds of thousands of dollars of our tax money on this function every year. In the 4th Quarter of 2024, I requested a copy of the airport noise complaint logs under the California Public Records Act. When I received this data, I found that each complaint log entry included the last name of the person who submitted the complaint.

Analysis of this data, which I assumed at the time was public information, revealed some astounding results for that quarter: (See Figure 1). Note that instead of last names, I have substituted a Unique Identifier (UID) for each individual.

• Four individuals accounted for 90% of the 1,587 complaints in those three months;
• In December 2024, only two individuals made 78% of that month's 756 complaints and one of them (UID = usbog), had made 49% of the complaints and filed them all within just 8 hours.
• Extending this investigation revealed that in 2025 (January through June), two individuals made 83% of the 3,667 complaints recorded in those 6 months.

Furthermore, one of these individuals (UID = ornei) began in January 2025 to use what appears to be an automated process to file multiple identical complaints within a few seconds. In June 2025, there were 47 instances of these multiple automated filings, where from 3 to 7 identical complaints were filed each time, averaging one every 8 seconds!

A short excerpt from the complaint log for June 2025 is shown in Figure 2 to illustrate these automated complaints.