The Cold Call Hoax

In 1992, various businesses across America, mostly fast food restaurants, started receiving calls from a police officer claiming that either an employee or a customer at the restaurant had committed a crime.

This crime was usually theft.

The caller would call and then would speak to a manager, telling them that he is also on a call with a higher level manager of the chain and would ask them to take the accused person into the office and search them.

The caller would often give a basic description of usually a young woman, late teens, early 20s, with either blonde hair or brown hair, and this would usually be enough for the manager to pinpoint somebody that worked in the restaurant that fit that description.

Once the manager had the accused person in the office, the policeman on the phone would instruct the manager to search them, usually asking the young woman to remove items of clothing.

There were around 70 cases of these incidents, but the most famous and the one that we're gonna talk about today is that of a girl that we're gonna call Sarah to protect her identity.

Now, this case is by far the most notorious, and it lasted the longest, and it involved the most people.

Sarah was an 18-year-old girl who had just gotten a job at a fast food restaurant in Mount Washington, Kentucky, in the United States.

Her mother had recently had some health problems and lost her job, and so Sarah was planning to attend medical school after she graduated.

But in the meantime, she was taking as many shifts as she could to help out her mum and her family.

On April 9th, 2004, Sarah had just finished her shift for the day and was getting ready to leave the restaurant when one of the managers on duty asked if she could actually stay longer that evening, do the evening shift, because the person who was supposed to work had just called in sick.