In the winter of 2025, a Manitoba man named Andrew Rivard saw a Crime Stoppers advertisement offering a $2,000 reward and called in what he knew about illegal cigarette sales in his neighbourhood. He gave his full name, because the whole premise of Crime Stoppers is that it does not matter: the tip is anonymous, the promise is ironclad, nobody will ever connect it back to you. “I was told nothing would come of it; no one would come to me with, you know, I guess, resentment,” he said. “I just was hoping it would be that exactly — anonymous.”
His tip, name attached, was sitting in a leaked database. So were more than 1.5 million other tips submitted to Canadian Crime Stoppers programs over the past 25 years, an exclusive CBC investigation by Valérie Ouellet and Michelle Allan has found. CBC used the leaked data to contact more than a dozen tipsters, including Rivard, who responded with shock and fear. “It’s very scary, to be honest,” he said; he now worries his home address and phone number could be used for retaliation.
The product was the promise
It helps to understand what Crime Stoppers actually is. It is not the police. It is a network of 68 chapters registered as non-profits in Canada, according to Canada Revenue Agency data, that collect tips and pass some of them to law enforcement. The one asset the whole operation has — the only thing it sells, really — is the promise of anonymity. And that promise, it turns out, was subcontracted. The tips were managed on a platform called P3, run by a company named P3 Global Intel, which is owned by a company called Navigate360. P3 marketed the platform as “anonymous” and “secure.”
Last March, a hacktivist collective calling itself Internet Yiff Machine broke in and took the lot, publishing a manifesto saying it wanted to disprove exactly that claim. A copy of the data reached journalists and researchers via Distributed Denial of Secrets, a U.S. non-profit that archives leaked documents it deems to be in the public interest. CBC says it worked on an encrypted, offline setup, limited access to a small team, and intends to destroy its copy of the dataset. The Crime Stoppers association and its chapters have said little beyond confirming a hack more than six months ago, and say they are awaiting a detailed report from Navigate360. These are the first precise public figures on the scale of it.
What was in the files
More than 850,000 tips — about half of the Canadian records CBC identified — contained personally identifiable information: street addresses, phone numbers, tens of thousands of personal emails, licence plates, and hundreds of banking details connected to cash rewards. CBC could not always tell whether a name belonged to a tipster, a victim or an accused person. But in over 4,300 reports, tipsters introduced themselves by full name — a fraction of entries, less than one per cent over 25 years, yet the association explicitly tells callers not to do this, and hundreds of those tips carried staff warnings that the tipster had “self-identified” or been “exposed.” The names sat there unredacted anyway.
The contents are not about stolen lawnmowers. CBC found tips touching the Barry and Honey Sherman murders, the disappearance of Amber Tuccaro, the Luka Magnotta case and the manhunt for Ryan Wedding. A third of all tips concerned drugs; hundreds named individuals and implicated the Hells Angels, the Rock Machine, the Outlaws and B.C.’s Red Scorpions and Independent Soldiers. Some tipsters wrote explicitly that they feared retribution for speaking.
And here is the part that makes the banking details make sense, in a bleak way. Staff notes suggest nearly 49,000 tips were linked to a case cleared by an arrest or criminal charges, and nearly 1,000 tipsters were approved for cash rewards. You cannot wire a reward to an anonymous person; at some point, someone has to be someone. The system promised anonymity on the way in and needed identity on the way out, and it kept both, for decades, in the same database.
One woman, whose identity CBC withheld over safety concerns, had tipped police about the then-unsolved murder of a loved one. “I just feel all the anxiety and scared feeling come back,” she said. Police have since charged someone with murder. “They were capable of hurting my loved one. They could come back and hurt one of us.”
Ali Dehghantanha, the Canada Research Chair in Cybersecurity and Threat Intelligence at the University of Guelph and one of two experts shown CBC’s methodology and data samples, was blunt: “For a system that has been designed to promise anonymity to the users, that has failed categorically.” He sketched the obvious follow-on crime as a hypothetical phone call to a tipster: “Imagine I am calling you and talking about the tip that you have provided and asking for more information. Immediately, I build ... trust.” “I am really concerned about these records … being in the hands of the wrong people,” he added, “while those people who have been impacted are not aware of that and do not have any support.”
After seeing CBC’s findings, the RCMP said in a statement that the breach could “jeopardize public safety, including the safety of tipsters, individuals identified in tips and police officers” — and noted it had originally been told the leak contained no Canadian data or personal information. The Canadian Crime Stoppers Association declined an interview; its president, David J. Forster, said in writing that they “recognize the concern and uncertainty this incident has created, particularly for people who trust Crime Stoppers with sensitive information.”
Somewhere in that database are 25 years of people doing the one thing their neighbours and their gangs most wanted them not to do. They were told no one would ever know. The vendor’s sales pitch said the platform was secure. The hacktivists, in fairness, were quite open about testing that claim.