Crime Stoppers has stopped taking tips, because the anonymous ones were not

The entire proposition of Crime Stoppers rests on one word. Anonymous. You tell them what you saw and nobody ever learns it was you. That word stopped being true in March, and most of the people it covered are hearing about it now.

The platform is P3 Global Intel, run by a Texas firm called Navigate360, and chapters on both sides of the border used it to take tips by phone, website and app. A CBC investigation published this month put the haul at more than 1.5 million tips spanning 25 years, over 850,000 of them carrying personal information: addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and banking details attached to reward payments. The hacktivist group that took the data said the point was to disprove the claim that the service was anonymous and secure.

Toronto Crime Stoppers lost 176,859 tips submitted between January 2022 and November 2025, plus 14,973 names found inside them, and nobody can yet say which of those names belong to tipsters and which to the people being reported. The chapter was told in April its records were fine, then told in June they were not. It has now closed every channel: "Until we have a safer way to protect you, please do not send us tips by phone, online, or through the app." Halton Regional Police have suspended the service too. Guelph Wellington lost 14,898 tips reaching back to 1996.

The lesson generalises past this one charity. Anonymous nearly always means the recipient promises not to look, not that the system is incapable of showing them, and a promise is only as durable as the database behind it. Worth assuming about any form that asks for your details and swears it will forget them. Tendvane's Privacy and accounts check shows which of your own accounts have turned up in known leaks, which is the part of this you can actually see.