Kingston Police suspend Crime Stoppers tips after data breach exposes tipsters
Kingston and several Ontario police forces have halted Crime Stoppers tip intake after a cyberattack stole data from the P3 platform, potentially exposing anonymous tipsters.
Ontario police forces halt Crime Stoppers after breach exposed anonymous tips
Kingston Police have suspended their use of Crime Stoppers following a cybersecurity breach that may have compromised the identities of people who submitted anonymous tips, kingstondaily.ca reports. Forces in Halton, Peel, York, Hamilton and Toronto have made similar announcements.
The breach centres on P3, a tip-management software platform used by Toronto Crime Stoppers since 2018 and provided by Navigate360. In March, hackers stole data from the platform, Toronto Crime Stoppers Chair Sean Sportun confirmed in a statement Wednesday. Navigate360 "repeatedly" assured the organisation the system was secure, Sportun said, but a month after the attack the provider acknowledged that some Canadian data had been taken — while insisting Toronto submissions were unaffected.
That position changed in June, when Toronto Crime Stoppers was told that tips submitted between January 2022 and November 2025 had been exposed. A month later, the affected figure was placed at 176,859 tips, with 12,392 of them potentially containing personal information.
"We never ask for your name, and we don't want it. But people sometimes include details to explain what they saw," Sportun said. "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."
In September and October, Navigate360 provided Toronto Crime Stoppers with a list of 14,973 names found in the breach. Sportun said the list "lacks detail necessary to measure the risk involved" because it did not identify whose names they were. Toronto Crime Stoppers continues to press Navigate360 for further information. The company did not return a request for comment from Global News.
Sportun also noted that "anonymously sourced information" reported this week had not been shared with his organisation. A CBC investigation published Wednesday reported that more than 1.5 million Canadian Crime Stoppers tips were affected in total.
Tech analyst Carmi Levy told Global News the reputational damage is severe. "Crime Stoppers' brand as we know it is essentially dead," Levy said. "This is catastrophic. If you called in information on any crime at all, and you assumed that information would be held confidential, that has now been blown up."
Sean Sparling, a former deputy chief of the Sault Ste. Marie Police Service, acknowledged the scale of the disruption, noting that officers across Canada rely on Crime Stoppers "on a daily basis." He nonetheless expressed confidence the programme would recover. "Knowing Crime Stoppers and how well it's organised, how well it works and its importance to the law enforcement community and the safety of our communities, I fully expect they're going to recover from this," Sparling told Global News.
Crime Stoppers programmes in Peel and Hamilton said Thursday they are continuing to seek additional details from Navigate360. Police in Kingston, York and Halton said they are assessing what impact the breach has on their operations.
Each force noted that residents can still report information through standard police channels, though those options do not offer anonymity. Anyone facing an immediate emergency should call 911.
"Until we have a safer way to protect you, please do not send us tips by phone, online or through the app," Sportun said. "Pausing our program means that option isn't available now, and we did not make this decision lightly. We are pausing because those people deserve a system we can fully stand behind."
Source: Google News JM — Kingston