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The spurious warning to women alert below began appearing in inboxes in mid-August 2002 as an article from the AP news wire, and a slightly rewritten version (minus the Associated Press attribution) initiated another round of forwardings in mid-2005 and again in late 2007. This story is (and always was) fiction, and nothing even remotely approaching it has come from Associated Press. If nothing else, the sloppy phrasing (The way it works is ....) and poor grammar (He orders her to remove all of her clothing and kick them out of the stall) betray this as a clumsy attempt to imitate a genuine article issued by a real news service. Moreover, we haven't turned up a single news account (then or now) of a mall robbery's being pulled off in the manner described, much less that this crime occurs with amazing regularity. In any case, this sort of robbery wouldn't leave hordes of naked women skulking in mall washrooms for hours and hours after thieves had made off with their clothing. Most shopping malls maintain regular schedules of checking their restrooms for cleanliness and service problems every hour or so, and even if out of order placards really dissuaded every woman who just wanted to check her make-up or had to deal with a child doing the cross-eyed, hopping-from-one-foot-to-the-other I have to go! dance from entering a bathroom, neither slavish obedience to signs nor embarrassment of nakedness would likely bar a putative victim from simply sticking her head out the door and calling for help.
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