A telephone call made to trick or deceive someone for humorous or malicious purposes.
anybody who makes a hoax call to the emergency services is potentially risking lives
Example sentencesExamples
- A £1,000 bounty has been put on the head of anyone who makes a hoax call during the firefighters' dispute.
- The spokesman said the number of hoax calls had fallen dramatically.
- He received a call over the car radio instructing him to go to "a hoax call" near the border.
- Whenever the emergency services can identify repeated hoax calls from a phone, companies suspend the service to the bill payer.
- Crews providing emergency cover for the district received 15 hoax calls by midnight.
- The problem was worst in Scotland, where there were nearly 300 hoax calls in the first ten hours of the stoppage.
- This area in particular was experiencing a large number of hoax calls this year.
- Hoax calls hinder response times to real emergencies.
- The defendant had a long history of making hoax calls.
- Firefighters have blasted 'mindless idiots' who sent them out on two hoax calls last night.