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Cops Warn Restaurants About Orders Called In From Cell Phones

CHICAGO (CBS) – If your cell phone is your primary phone, you might be out of luck the next time you try to order in.

Some restaurants are now refusing to deliver to cell phone customers following a rash of robberies of their drivers.

Police say lots of food delivery drivers in Chicago are getting robbed by people using cell phones to target them.

So, Chicago police just issued a business alert. It warns business owners in the Chinatown and Hyde Park areas not to take any cell phone orders.

As George Smith headed out with some hot Leona's grub on Thursday, he can't help but think about the night earlier this month when he took a cell phone order and got robbed.

"They said, 'Give me everything you've got' … I said, 'Here, take it,'" Smith says.

Michael Bjordal, manager of Leona's in Hyde Park, says he had a driver shot a few years ago and he'll take the new warning seriously. He stopped short of saying the restaurant will ignore all cell phone orders.

"We don't know if we're going to go to quite that extreme yet," he says. "We're going to use our common sense. A lot of it is just literally sizing up the area."

Police listed cell numbers on the alert to help protect local businesses.

A lot of people don't have landlines anymore, so the businesses could stand to lose a lot of money by refusing orders called in on a cell.

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