Two armed robberies last month may still result in felony charges, but the robbers won't be the ones prosecuted, police said.

In what Sgt. Richard Kinsey of the Ann Arbor Police Department describes as a "weird coincidence," two robberies near campus on Saturday, Jan. 24 were both determined to be fakes.

The alleged robberies, which occurred within two hours of each other, have been investigated and determined to be false reports.

Kinsey said it would be up to the Washtenaw County Prosecutor's office to decide whether to file felony charges against either party. The charge for misreporting a serious crime like armed robbery is a minimum of four years in prison.

"The important thing for people to realize is that when you falsely report a felony crime, that is a felony," Kinsey said.

In the robbery on Catherine Street, a student reported he was accosted by a man with a gun and forced to surrender his shoes, coat and $50. Kinsey said the student most likely faked the incident to garner sympathy from a friend.

The incident on South Forest Street was not completely fabricated, police said. Using witness accounts, police established that the alleged victim, a cab driver for Shamrock Cabs, paid three men to push his car out of a ditch.

The driver gave them $200. The men tried to push the car out of the ditch, failed and got into an argument with the driver. The driver asked for the money back, and the men responded by hitting him in the face. The driver claimed he was struck with a black handgun, but police now believe no gun was involved.

Kinsey said despite the harsh penalties for offenders, faking a crime is not an very rare occurrence. False reports of robbery and criminal sexual conduct pose the biggest problems for police, he said, because of the frequency in which they are misreported and the resources that police pour into them.

Department of Public Safety spokeswoman Diane Brown said students sometimes report having various items, particularly M-Cards, stolen when they are actually just lost.

Filing a false report of a theft without intimidation, such as M-Card larceny, could result in a misdemeanor charge and a 93-day sentence.