Ottawa and Ontario Police Suspend Crime Stoppers After 1.5M Tips Leaked

The Ottawa Police Service and multiple Ontario police forces — including Toronto, York Region, Halton Region, Windsor, Kingston, Cornwall, and Hamilton — have suspended their partnerships with local Crime Stoppers chapters following a massive data leak. An analysis of the hacked data by CBC News revealed that more than 1.5M tips submitted to Canadian Crime Stoppers programs over the past 25 years were compromised.

More than 850k of the compromised tips — about half of all Canadian records identified — contained personally identifiable information, though CBC could not determine in every instance whether the data belonged to a tipster, a victim, or an accused individual. Ottawa Police stated that the independent Crime Stoppers platform is not connected to internal police systems and directed the public to contact police directly, noting that direct reporting does not necessarily provide the same anonymity. "While we take the protection of personal information seriously and handle it in accordance with our privacy and information security obligations, it doesn't necessarily offer the same anonymity as Crime Stoppers." — Ottawa Police Service