Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Complaints MCP server

This MCP server provides access to the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) Consumer Complaint Database through a local-only server. It's designed to work with MCP-aware clients like Claude Desktop, allowing you to search and retrieve consumer complaint records directly through the interface.

Installation

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer
• uv (recommended) or pip

Installing Dependencies

While not strictly necessary if using uv run, you can pre-install the required packages:

Using uv:

uv pip install -r pyproject.toml

Using pip:

pip install -r pyproject.toml

The server requires the following Python packages:

• httpx
• mcp[cli]
• python-dateutil

Usage

Starting the Server

Launch the MCP server directly from the command line:

uv run complaints.py

The server runs over standard input/output and waits for requests from an MCP-aware client like Claude Desktop.

Configuring Claude Desktop

To use this tool with Claude Desktop:

1. Locate the provided claude_desktop_config.json file
2. Edit the file to replace INSERTPATH with the actual path to the repository on your machine
3. Import the configuration into Claude Desktop

Using the Tool

The server exposes a single tool called search_complaints that queries the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database API. You can use this tool to search for specific complaints by various parameters including:

• Date ranges
• Companies
• Products
• Issues
• States
• Keywords

When using Claude with this tool enabled, you can ask it to search for specific types of complaints, analyze trends, or extract information from the database by requesting Claude to use the search_complaints function.

API Reference

The server interacts with the CFPB Consumer Complaint Database API, providing a simplified interface through the MCP protocol.

How to install this MCP server

For Claude Code

To add this MCP server to Claude Code, run this command in your terminal:

claude mcp add-json "consumer-complaint-database" '{"command":"python","args":["complaints.py"]}'

See the official Claude Code MCP documentation for more details.

For Cursor

There are two ways to add an MCP server to Cursor. The most common way is to add the server globally in the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file so that it is available in all of your projects.

If you only need the server in a single project, you can add it to the project instead by creating or adding it to the .cursor/mcp.json file.

Adding an MCP server to Cursor globally

To add a global MCP server go to Cursor Settings > Tools & Integrations and click "New MCP Server".

When you click that button the ~/.cursor/mcp.json file will be opened and you can add your server like this:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "consumer-complaint-database": {
            "command": "python",
            "args": [
                "complaints.py"
            ]
        }
    }
}

Adding an MCP server to a project

To add an MCP server to a project you can create a new .cursor/mcp.json file or add it to the existing one. This will look exactly the same as the global MCP server example above.

How to use the MCP server

Once the server is installed, you might need to head back to Settings > MCP and click the refresh button.

The Cursor agent will then be able to see the available tools the added MCP server has available and will call them when it needs to.

You can also explicitly ask the agent to use the tool by mentioning the tool name and describing what the function does.

For Claude Desktop

To add this MCP server to Claude Desktop:

1. Find your configuration file:

• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json
• Windows: %APPDATA%\Claude\claude_desktop_config.json
• Linux: ~/.config/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json

2. Add this to your configuration file:

{
    "mcpServers": {
        "consumer-complaint-database": {
            "command": "python",
            "args": [
                "complaints.py"
            ]
        }
    }
}

3. Restart Claude Desktop for the changes to take effect