It is about a man who called Fast Food joints, pretending to be a local policeman, and was able to convince the manager to strip search a young employee
He did it, not once, twice or thrice but literally dozens of times.
The main case was one where it was captured on CCTV. The manager, and her fiancé, had an 18 yr old girl strip, do jumping jacks, and perform a sex act on the fiancé over a course of several hours.
I was overcome by the number of people who seemingly never saw a police procedural series on TV, let alone never taking a civics class at a high school level.
I felt sorry for the victims of the hoax, but…sheeesh…
I find it hard to believe that any “manager” would fall for something like this, but they apparently did. Since I’m not going to watch it can you tell us what the motivation of the hoaxer was? Did he do it for kicks, or was there a more twisted reason? How old was he?
Wannabe cop, he was a prison guard. He went to the Academy but never became full time cop. I expect he failed the pysch evaluation. He wanted authority.
He was tried in Kentucky but was aquitted.
My wife and i wondered why the FBI was not involved, since he pulled the hoax in 32 states
At what point does a non-brain dead person start to say ‘this just ain’t right!’
We have report that an female employee stole from a customers purse. I have someone from the corporate office on the line, whom you will not be able to hear.
We are too busy to come there, so…She can either come down to the station and be searched, or you can perform the search.
Call her into your office. Cover any windows with a trash bag.
Make her remove her top.
Make her take her work pants off.
Take the clothes and her car keys and put them in bag and remove them from the office.
Make her remove her bra. What is the cup size?
Feel all around her breasts.
Make her remove her panties.
Make her do jumping jacks and until she starts to sweat.
Rub you hands all over her body, see if anything turns green.
Make her bend over in front of you, check her anus and vagina for hidden drugs.
Make her lay in your lap and swat her buttocks.
Make her perform a sex act with you.
One of the managers complied with all requests. It was all caught on CCTV. including having her (the manager’s) fiancé perform the sex act. Which he (the fiancé) was sentences to 18 months in prison for.
There is, of course, the possibility that the managers did these things because they actually wanted to, and the “police orders” gave them the pretext they needed to maybe get away with it.
reminds me of those fake "shoplifting "videos in which someone usually(but not always) female gets caught stealing something and after being fondled while being searched makes a deal to bang the security guard so the cops weren’t called …
They have verified that this hoax was pulled in 32 states successfully. No telling how many times he got hung up on. It seems to have been his primary source of recreation.
It worked 4 times in Massachusetts on the same day.
Actually watching this right now - asshole did it for TEN freaking years!
One of the victims bent McDonalds over and shoved it up their ass, they had been trying to victim shame her … McD’s knew it had been going on for 6 years, and didn;t bother warning their management or employees it was going on. If I were one of the franchise holders, or even managers, I would have tried suing McD’s corporate for not having warned us it was going on.
And as a mouthy sarcastic teen, I wouldn’t let my manager strip search me, I would tell the cops to bring it on, get in the phone to my dad and have him show up with a lawyer.
Gerold Frank’s “The Boston Strangler” describes a similar hoax caller operating in the city at the time of the murders. That one if I remember correctly involved calling private residence(s) and is even harder to fathom.
That is what shocked us most. They, and other companies knew it was happening…and they couldn’t send a memo? My company would make it part of the videos we all have to watch every year.
Settlement was something like 6 million bucks … Liebeck v. McD in comparison was under 1 million [the lady who got significant burns to her freaking genitals @_@ from over hot coffee spilled in her lap] so yes, McD got bent over and not in a fun way.
Honestly, Typo_Negative is right, most other companies when faced with a phone scammer inducing sexual assault and other potential charges [up to false imprisonment and kidnapping] would be all over internal memos to management, training for staffers …
As I said in my OP, my response to the offer of stripping in front of my manager, I would be on the phone to the cops myself, and to my dad to bring me a lawyer - keep in mind, many females at that time working fast food would potentially still be in high school, so that is actually sexual assault of a MINOR …
What I gathered from this, and from the movie Compliance, is that the scheme depended on the employee and the manager both being susceptible. The 60+ times that it went as far as sexual assault must have been a very small percentage of the thousands of calls this guy made. I’m sure there were plenty of times when the manager said “I’m not searching her: no warrant, I believe her, are you even a cop?” And that would have been it, even if the employee was saying “I’ll do it, if it’ll prove my innocence.” But if the manager believed the caller, well, they’re the boss and the employee has to follow their orders, right? And if the boss does start to catch on, they still might not want to tell their employee, “Oh no, it looks like this was a scam. Here’s your clothes back, I’m so sorry; I never should have made you do this.” And then face them the next day? Yyyyyeah.
I would have too, or at least I would have started that way. However, I can see it going like this:
Me: “Not without a warrant. And I want to call my mom and see what she wants me to do.”
Manager: “She says she won’t do it without a warrant. And she wants to call her mother.”
Caller: “Put her on.” [to me] “I’ve already informed your mother about this, and she’s furious. She says you better cooperate or else.”
Me: [turning green, because as a teen I was more afraid of my parents than I was of the police] “But…but she wouldn’t want me to submit to a search without a warrant.”
Caller: “Put your boss back on.” [to boss] “See, the thing is, if we come down there with a warrant, you’ll have uniformed officers storming in and hauling the fry girl away in handcuffs. You don’t want a scene like that in your store, right?..She’s still saying no? She said WHAT?! See, now do you believe she’s a thief, with an attitude like that? You want someone like her working for you?”
Manager: “You do this or you’re fired. And if you try to use me as a reference, I’ll tell everyone that you stole from a customer, lied about it, mouthed off to me and the police officer, and refused to cooperate.”
Me: I dunno. I might have stood my ground on calling my mom. I might have said Fine, I’m fired; I’ll see you in court. Or I might have said Okay, don’t fire me, I’ll cooperate. My point is, it was not just a matter of what the employee believed; a lot depended on what the manager believed. And there must have been numerous instances of someone being fired or quitting, rather than submit to a search. So they weren’t assaulted, but they were still harmed. And wouldn’t it be a barrel of laughs if someone had weed in her bag, in a state where that wasn’t legal. (Which I think was all of them, at the time this was happening.)
And do you remember the sequence with the woman whose manager was told to rub his hands all over her body, after she’d worked up a sweat, and check for green patches, where the money was supposedly hidden? Then you probably also remember that a judge said of her [paraphrased from memory] that it must have been a painful lesson, but hopefully now she would learn to think for herself. And the manager? Who was doing his thinking when he obeyed the order to “rub” his teenage female employee “all over her body”?
Seems to me that the way to avoid any kind of harm coming from these calls was to be skeptical immediately, and to be decisive. “You’ll have to come in and do this in person,” rather than “Why aren’t you here, in person?” which the caller would translate as “Please lie to me some more.” Like in that opening sequence, when the guy came in during the strip search and yelled at the caller. “Then you should know you can’t strip search a minor!” It had to be someone refusing to let the caller control the situation, and unfortunately, not everyone has it in them to do that.
Sorry, I know this is a lot! Just one more point to make. I’m sure it didn’t work on people who had some experience with police, on either side of the law. I also gathered that the caller used scary terms like “haul you in,” “drag her downtown,” and generally made it sound like going through the proper channels would be a horrible ordeal. But hey, because he’s so nice, he’s going to give her a break by only asking for a strip search! Except it doesn’t work that way. Cops don’t ask civilians to do their work for them, especially not collecting evidence. And they don’t give breaks to suspects. If they made a habit of going easy on suspected criminals, they wouldn’t be law enforcement. What he was doing was a classic salesman ploy. “Do you want to be handcuffed, perp walked, fingerprinted and booked, then spend the night in a holding cell with the dregs of society, before posting bail that will probably be as much as you earn in a year?..Well the soft option is a strip search, that’s all. Nothing to worry about.” And a scared, impressionable teenager who needs the job might not dare to say, “I’m not doing that either.”
And the manager? Who was doing his thinking when he obeyed the order to “rub” his teenage female employee “all over her body”?