This orange Niagara tabby cat attracts crime.

With his laidback personality and a deformed paw, Gimpy allures not only belly-rubs and strokes from around the neighbourhood, but also some petty theft.

Gimpy cost his owner seven counts of theft, and almost a hundred dollars in stolen property in the past year.

“I feel like it’s Gimpy!” said Eva Dudla, his 18-year-old owner. “He’s just attracting these things. Maybe it’s bad karma.”

Or maybe not. The chance of having something stolen in the Niagara region was more than double than in the metropolitan Toronto in 2014, according to an analysis of Statistics Canada data.

St. Catharines and the Niagara region had the highest rate of theft under $5000 in Ontario in 2014.

According to analysis, the theft rate in the region increased by an average of over 40 per cent since 2010.

“I don’t know why these numbers went up,” said Constable Phillip Gavin, the media relations officer for the Niagara Police.

But Gavin said a possibility of the sudden increase could be related to an increase in crime reporting. “We may have an elevated number than other cities, but it may be the case that we have our public reporting more.”

But some theft seem too trivial to report to the police, said Dudla who’s had several cat-collars and a cat car-magnet stolen this year.

Unreported counts of theft are not represented in StatsCan numbers, like the seven Gimpy-related theft in the past year.

“It’s a cat collar,” said Dudla. “It is of value to me, but I feel like the police will be like ‘yeah, okay…’”

Dudla and Gimpy’s story began four years ago at a St. Catharines Goodwill where Dudla volunteered. A colleague’s cat had a dozen kittens and offered Dudla one for free.

The day she went to choose from the litter, she noticed one with a deformed paw. The colleague told her to leave the “sick ones” but Dudla insisted.

“She finally just let me,” said Dudla. “So I wasn’t supposed to have him in the first place.”

Dudla named her new friend Gimpy after his handicap.

Last year, Dudla bought a car magnet of a paw to symbolize her love for Gimpy.

“I love my cat so much, he’s my favourite thing ever,” said Dudla. “I wanted a little piece of him to bring around with me.”

After a shopping trip this spring, she noticed the magnet was peeled off her car. “I was like “Oh my goodness! Oh no!” and I was really upset,” she said.

Someone stole my “everything I learned about sarcasm I learned from my cat” magnet off my car.. Not like I wasn’t already having a bad day

— £va (@EvaDudla) April 12, 2015

But apparently, “this happens all the time,” according to Dudla.

Last October, Dudla reported her second stolen cat collar on twitter: 

This is the second time someone has stole my cats collar and I’m fucking pissed — £va (@EvaDudla) October 30, 2014

Since then, she’s had four more collars stolen off of Gimpy.

“I’d have one for three or four weeks, and then it disappears,” she said.

Gimpy is trained to use the bathroom outside so he wanders the neigbourhood every day. Dudla suspects that Gimpy’s friendly nature is exploited by the collar-thief.

“I call him a very ‘chill cat.’ He doesn’t even meow, really,” she said. “So I was disappointed at why people are like that, you know?” she said.

Gimpy’s bad luck may be a reflection of the increase in theft rates in the region.

But concerning the past year’s unsolved collar conundrum, Dudla is still stumped.

“I don’t know!” she laughed. “That’s why it confuses me so much. And it’s all about Gimpy, too! I feel like he has some connection with theft.”