Phony Cop Orders Female Restaurant Employees to Strip

To summarize, a caller to various franchise restaurants has been impersonating an authority figure and ordering female employees to strip and perform lewd acts in order to avoid arrest and/or being fired. The hoaxes have occurred over 60 times in 32 states since 1995. File this series of stories under "Astonishingly Gullible."

From Courier-Journal.com:

On Nov. 30, 2000, the caller persuaded the manager at a McDonald's in Leitchfield, Ky., to remove her own clothes in front of a customer whom the caller said was suspected of sex offenses. The caller promised that undercover officers would burst in and arrest the customer the moment he attempted to molest her, said Detective Lt. Gary Troutman of the Leitchfield Police Department.

"We asked her why she hadn't called local police, and she said she thought it was local police who had called her," Troutman said.

On May 29, 2002, a girl celebrating her 18th birthday -- in her first hour of her first day on the job at the McDonald's in Roosevelt, Iowa -- was forced to strip, jog naked and assume a series of embarrassing poses, all at the direction of a caller on the phone, according to court and news accounts.

On Jan. 26, 2003, according a police report in Davenport, Iowa, an assistant manager at an Applebee's Neighborhood Grill & Bar conducted a degrading 90-minute search of a waitress at the behest of a caller who said he was a regional manager -- even though the man had called collect, and despite the fact the assistant manager had read a company memo warning about hoax calls just a month earlier. He later told police he'd forgotten about the memo.

On June 3, 2003, according to a city police spokesman in Juneau, Alaska, a caller to a Taco Bell there said he was working with the company to investigate drug abuse at the store, and had a manager pick out a 14-year-old customer -- and then strip her and force her to perform lewd acts.

Investigators have concluded that the scheme is the work of one very convincing man since the methods of operation are essentially identical in all cases. A number of restaurants are having to defend themselves in court against lawsuits by victimized employees claiming emotional and physical abuse.

It's certain that the perpetrator is malicious and vulgar and, above all, proficient in psychologically manipulating people. He needs to be stopped.

Companion post at Diggers Realm.