David Shapshak
South Africa’s all-important emergency lines are being flooded with hoax phone calls.
The public’s first access to emergency services is through call centres, but many of these are clogged with a deluge of nuisance calls, largely from children who use public telephones and are therefore untraceable.
Of the 2000 calls that Cape Town’s 107 emergency line receives in a 12-hour cycle, 200 to 300 are genuine, says call centre manager John Ellis.
“Emergency services through- out South Africa are subjected to an ever-increasing volume of calls, many of which are not for life- and/or property-threatening situations. A high percentage of these calls are termed hoax or nuisance calls and often require responses that entail a waste of valuable manpower and allocation of resources,” says Ellis.
Each call needs to be answered and processed in case it is genuine.
“Hoax calls are taking up the time of the operators anyone coming through with a potential emergency is delayed. That is our main problem.”
This is an international problem, says Ellis, but he estimates that 107’s hoax calls, at 70%, is higher than the 50% average of many lines in the United States.
The problem is equally prevalent for the police services, whose 10111 emergency number is patched through to the nearest call centre, says Superintendent Eugene Opperman, head of police communication services on Johannesburg’s North Rand.
“We deal with between 59000 and 63000 calls a month at our call centre in Benoni; a large portion there are false calls,” he says.
While many of the calls come from children, Opperman says, bored adults often make nuisance calls too. A lot of them simply swear at the operators, while others ask inane questions such as “how is the weather?”
The 107 line handles calls for all emergency services, reducing the number of nuisance calls to their direct lines.
Last week a 17-year-old was arrested for making a hoax bomb threat apparently the first arrest of its kind for the call centre. The youth was identified because he called from his home phone and the number was logged by the centre.
Opperman says the police have arrested several people for hoax calls, including a company director.
“The courts don’t take lightly to this thing either. Stiff, stiff fines have been handed down.”
Ellis says most of the calls are made from public telephones. One solution would be to bar public phones from the call-centre system, but this could prevent a real crisis being reported.
The problem is also experienced by the Aids help line, which is run by Life Line SA. Between 50% and 60% of the calls to this service are hoaxes.
Hoaxes have also become a commonplace problem for e-mail users, who are bombarded with so-called virus alerts that are usually fakes but consume endless amounts of time and bandwidth. These, and unsolicited e-mails offering a range of products or services, are known as spam after the American canned-meat product.