Crime Stoppers thanks the community for the 1,680 tips submitted since the program began in January 2009. Crime Stoppers has a sophisticated program to allow tipsters to remain totally anonymous when submitting information to the program.
Using the communication network provided by national Crime Stoppers affiliates, the current technology makes it impossible for Crime Stoppers, law enforcement, an attorney or anybody else to trace your phone call, text message or web tip back to you.
When you dial 1-800-222-TIPS, the call goes to a private telephone company in Virginia. They transfer your call to one of their own in-house phone lines and then forward it on to the Crime Stoppers answering service in Texas. Even if one of the Texas operators had caller ID, which they don’t, the only number they would see is from Virginia, not your number.
So if someone were able to get the telephone records of the Crime Stoppers Texas answering service, the number recorded would be from the service in Virginia. The Virginia company purges all of its transfer records at the end of each month.
Web and text tips are handled in similar fashion. The messages are routed to computers in Canada where it is legal to transfer your message to another computer before forwarding it on to us. Even though we can send messages back and forth, this makes it impossible for anyone to trace a message back to your computer or your cell phone.
Finally a special IRS rule permits all Crime Stoppers rewards to be paid in cash with no tax reporting. A volunteer delivers the cash to you, at a time and place of your choosing, or Crime Stoppers will even hide it somewhere for you to pick up later.
Since the original Crime Stoppers organization began service in 1976, there are no known instances where an anonymous citizen’s identity has ever been revealed using Crime Stoppers information.
If you know something, you can safely say something by submitting your information on any crimes at http://www.crimestoppersusvi.org/ or by calling 1-800-222-TIPS (8477) or by texting “USVI” plus your message to CRIMES (274637).
