Strip search phone call scam

The strip search prank call scam was a series of incidents occurring for roughly a decade before 2004. These incidents involved a man calling a restaurant, claiming to be a police detective, and convincing managers to conduct strip-searches of female employees. Reports of over 70 such occurrences in 30 U.S. states finally led to the arrest and charging of David R. Stewart, a 37-year-old Florida corrections officer.

On October 31, 2006, Stewart was acquitted of all charges stemming from that arrest, including impersonating a police officer, soliciting sodomy and soliciting sexual abuse. The incident for which he was charged took place at a Louisville, Kentucky-area McDonald's in 2004. This is the only such incident in which Stewart has been prosecuted.

Incidents prior to 2004

There are dozens of incidents believed to have been perpetrated by the same caller. Some notable cases include:

• The first report of such a call came in 1995, in Devil’s Lake, N.D.; another came later that year in Fallon, Nev. The caller, usually pretending to be a police officer investigating a crime, targeted stores in small towns and rural communities — areas where managers were more likely to be trusting.
• A call to a McDonald's restaurant in Hinesville, Georgia resulted in a janitor performing a body cavity search on a 19-year old cashier.
• A 17-year-old customer at a Taco Bell in Phoenix, Arizona was strip-searched by a manager receiving this kind of prank call.
• 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.
• 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.
• At a Burger King in Pendleton, Ind., a supervisor was so intent on finishing a search of a 15-year-old girl in December 2001 that when the girl’s father arrived to pick her up from work, he had to jump over the counter to end her humiliation.
• And in Dover, Del., a Burger King manager who was strip-searching an 18-year-old employee in March 2003 fought off the worker’s mother and boyfriend so strenuously that state police had to be called.

Court records also show that over time, the demands in the hoax calls grew more perverse.

• At a McDonald’s in Hinesville, Ga., in February 2003, a 55-year-old janitor was told to put his finger in the vagina of a 19-year-old cashier, supposedly to look for contraband, according to court records.
• In Joplin, Mo., according to a police report, a caller in May 2004 persuaded a 16-year-old girl who was managing a Sonic restaurant to strip-search and perform oral sex on a 21-year-old male cook — and then got the cook to strip-search the manager.

Mount Washington, Kentucky incident

The final prank call in this scheme was made to a McDonald's restaurant in Mount Washington, Kentucky on April 9, 2004. According to assistant manager Donna Summers, the caller identified himself as a policeman, 'Officer Scott', he described an employee whom he said was suspected of stealing a customer's purse. Summers called 18-year-old employee Louise Ogborn to her office and told her of the suspicion. Following the instructions of the caller, Summers ordered Ogborn first to empty her pockets, and finally to remove all her clothing except for an apron, in an effort to find the stolen items. Again following the caller's instructions, Summers had another employee watch Ogborn when she had to leave the office to check the restaurant. The first employee she asked to do so refused, so she phoned her fiance Walter Nix, asking him to come in to 'help' with the situation.

According to Ogborn, after Summers passed off the phone to Nix, he continued to do as the caller told, even as the caller's requests became progressively more bizarre. A security camera recorded Nix forcing Ogborn to remove her apron, the only article of clothing she was still wearing, and to assume degrading positions, such as getting on all fours and allow Nix to slap her buttocks. At the caller's request, Nix then forced Ogborn to perform oral sex on him. The tape showed that Summers re-entered the office several times and dismissed Ogborn's pleas for help, a statement which Summers denies.

When another employee was asked to take part and objected, Summers decided to call the store manager, whom the caller claimed to have on another phone line. She then discovered that the store manager had not spoken to any police officers, and that the call had been a hoax. A quick-thinking employee dialed *69 to determine that the caller had called from a supermarket pay phone in Panama City, Florida. Summers then called police, who arrested Nix and began an investigation to find the caller.

Investigation and aftermath

Mt. Washington police quickly realized that this was only the latest in a long line of similar incidents. They contacted police in Panama City, who managed to track down the calling card used to make the call, and video of the transaction at the Wal-Mart where it was purchased. The buyer in the video was wearing a correctional officer's uniform, and queries to the correctional department led to the identification of the buyer as David Stewart. After his arrest, Stewart was extradited to Kentucky to face charges of impersonating a police officer, and solicitation of sodomy.

During his interrogation, Stewart insisted he'd never bought a calling card, but detectives found one in his house that had been used to call nine restaurants in the past year, including a Burger King in Idaho Falls, on the day its manager was reportedly duped. Police also found dozens of applications for police department jobs, hundreds of police magazines, police-type uniforms, guns and holsters, indicating that being or becoming a police officer was possibly a fantasy of the suspect. Nevertheless, a jury found Stewart not guilty.

Nix pleaded guilty to sexual abuse and other crimes in February 2006 and received 5 years in prison; Summers entered an Alford plea to a charge of unlawful imprisonment, a misdemeanor, and received probation.

The victim, Louise Ogborn, sued McDonald's for $200 million for failing to protect her during her ordeal. The civil trial began September 10, 2007 and ended October 5, 2007 when a jury awarded Ogborn $5 million in punitive damages and $1.1 million in compensatory damages and expenses. The jury decided that McDonald's was 50 percent at fault for Ogborn's ordeal. Summers, who had joined the suit and asked for $50 million, was awarded $1.1 million.

Questions about the scam

Many people who hear of these incidents wonder how someone could convince a victim to do these acts. In the ABC News report on the Kentucky incident, psychologist Jeff Gardere said that the caller probably enjoyed manipulating people into doing whatever he wanted, no matter how outlandish. He also notes that the caller was careful to select fast-food restaurants, which tend to have a "by the book" management style, because such an approach makes management less likely to know how to handle novel situations such as those the caller created.

Several social psychological principles could shed light on these situations. First, individuals have a tendency to obey authority figures. As shown in the Milgram obedience studies, most individuals will harm another under direction of what they feel is a legitimate authority, even if doing so is extremely stressful or unpleasant to them. They will surrender their personal responsibility to the authority figure, becoming like a puppet. By using police jargon, speaking in an authoritative manner, and dropping names of other significant authority figures (the local police chief, the restaurant's general manager), the caller created the impression of being a legitimate authority. Secondly, the gradual escalation of demands has been shown to be very effective in obtaining compliance. This is referred to as the "Foot-in-the-door effect". Individuals seem to consider the reasonableness of a request based on what they have already done, rather than on a more objective standard. By beginning with seemingly reasonable requests, such as taking the victim aside and searching their personal belongings, the caller was able to work his way up to unimaginable transgressions, such as sexual assault. In the Mount Washington incident, it was only when another employee who had not been part of the escalating demands was brought in that the wrongfulness of the situation became apparent.

See also

• Milgram experiment
• Stanford prison experiment, which was an experiment emphasizing how ordinary people can become sadistic.
• Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse, a similar incident in which the defendants claimed they were "just following orders".
• Nuremberg Defense, the origin of the "just following orders" legal defense.

References

• Follow-up report by ABC News, Nov. 30, 2006
• Louisville Courier-Journal report
• Original ABC News report on Kentucky incident
• Rapid City Journal report
• Milgram, S. Obedience to authority, Harper & Row, 1974.
• Cialdini, R. Influence: Science and practice, Allyn & Bacon, 2000.