Toronto Crime Stoppers pauses program after CBC investigation reveals more details of data leak

Toronto Crime Stoppers is pausing its program, effective immediately, its chair Sean Sportun said in a statement sent late Wednesday evening. The news follows an exclusive CBC investigation from earlier in the day revealing that information from more than 1.5 million tips submitted to Canadian Crime Stoppers programs over the last 25 years was exposed in a massive data breach.

More than 1.5 million Canadian tips exposed, including unredacted personal info, investigation found

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Toronto Crime Stoppers is pausing its program, effective immediately, its chair, Sean Sportun, said in a statement sent late Wednesday evening.

The news follows an exclusive CBC investigation from earlier in the day revealing that information from more than 1.5 million tips submitted to Canadian Crime Stoppers programs over the last 25 years was exposed in a massive data breach.

It was the first time precise figures were made public showing the severity of the information exposed, as well as how many Canadian tipsters were compromised. Up until the investigation was published, the Canadian Crime Stoppers Association (CCSA) and individual chapters had not spoken out about the extent of the breach, only saying they awaited a detailed report from their vendor, U.S.-based company Navigate360.

Toronto Crime Stoppers now says it has removed the “Tip Submit” feature from its website and will no longer accept or process any new information intended for the program. It has also advised Navigate360, which owns tip management platform P3, to immediately suspend the intake function for the Toronto Crime Stoppers chapter.

In the statement, the organization advised the public not to send tips by phone, online or by the app "until we have a safer way to protect you."

"People in Toronto have come to Toronto Crime Stoppers because we promised they could stay anonymous. This week’s reporting shows that for some of them, that promise was broken. We are deeply sorry," Sportun said in a statement. 

The Toronto Police Service also announced in a statement Wednesday evening that it has “temporarily suspended its use of Crime Stoppers" until further review.

• Updated

  More than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips leaked, CBC exclusive finds

News follows CBC investigation 

According to CBC's investigation, Toronto Crime Stoppers was the Canadian chapter with the most tips represented in the leak, with more than 179,000 tips linked to the organization. 

The analysis also revealed that more than half of all Canadian tips included personally identifiable information about tipsters, individuals named in allegations and even Crime Stoppers staff and police. We could not determine in every instance whether the information belonged to a tipster, a victim or those accused of a crime.

However, CBC found that in over 4,300 reports, tipsters introduced themselves with a full name, although Crime Stoppers explicitly tells the public to avoid including identifying details. Still, this represented a fraction of reports, at less than one per cent of all entries over 25 years. CBC wasn't able to verify whether all names were legitimate.

Despite hundreds of those tips containing clear staff warnings that a tipster had "self-identified" or had been "exposed," the information still appeared in the database unredacted.

WATCH | More on the investigation:

Over a million Canadian tips leaked from Crime Stoppers database

October 21|

Duration

1:52

Toronto Crime Stoppers' Wednesday statement reiterated that the program aims to keep tips anonymous.

“We never ask for your name, and we don’t want it," it said. "But people sometimes include details to explain what they saw. Before a tip goes to investigators, our practice is to remove those details. It has come to light that some of those original tips containing potentially identifying information were stolen from P3.”

The Toronto police statement, which was sent at almost the same time as the response from Toronto Crime Stoppers, said the news "raises serious concerns regarding the protection of confidential information provided through the Crime Stoppers program." 

At the time of publication, CBC could still access a tip form using the main P3 platform. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Valérie Ouellet is a bilingual senior reporter with CBC’s Investigative Unit in Toronto. Her data-driven stories on women’s health, medical devices, international students and the correctional system have earned numerous awards and accolades, including the St. Clair Balfour Fellowship at Massey College and the CAJ Data Journalism Award. She also teaches data journalism and mentors reporters across Canada. Since joining CBC/Radio-Canada in 2010, she has reported from Saskatchewan, Ontario and Quebec in both official languages. You can contact her with tips to valerie.ouellet@cbc.ca.