The strip search phone call scam was a series of incidents, mostly occurring in rural areas of the United States, that extended over a period of at least ten years, starting in 1994. The incidents involved a man calling a restaurant or grocery store, claiming to be a police officer, and then convincing managers to conduct strip searches of employees (or, in at least two known cases, a customer), and to perform other bizarre and humiliating acts on behalf of "the police". The calls were most often made to fast-food restaurants in small towns. More than 70 such phone calls were reported in 30 U.S. states. A 2004 incident in Mount Washington, Kentucky, led to the arrest of David Richard Stewart, a resident of Florida. Stewart was acquitted of all charges in the Mount Washington case. He was suspected of, but never charged with, making similar scam calls elsewhere. Police reported that the scam calls ended after Stewart's arrest.
Before the Mount Washington incident There were numerous prior incidents in many states that followed the pattern of the fraudulent call to a McDonald's restaurant in Mount Washington, Kentucky. The majority of the calls were made to fast-food chain restaurants, but some were made to grocery stores and video rental stores. With every hoax, a male caller who identified himself as a police officer or other authority figure would contact a manager or supervisor. He would solicit their help in detaining an employee or customer who was suspected of a crime, such as theft or drug possession. He would then provide a generic description of the suspect (typically a young female employee, but a few victims were male or older) which the manager would recognize, and he would then ask the manager to search the suspected person. The tasks would initially start as strip searches before gradually becoming more invasive and sexual in nature as the "investigation" continued. Eventually, the caller would have groomed the manager to the point where they would do almost anything asked by the caller, such as spanking, kissing, inappropriate touching, oral sex, and even sexual assault and rape. Many of the incidents continued for hours until a participant realized the call was a hoax or a bystander intervened. Some notable hoaxes were:
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