Typical Patterns of Hoax and Genuine Emergency Calls

Hoax emergency calls, where a caller deliberately reports a false emergency, burden emergency response centers, may lead to a waste of resources, and delay help elsewhere. Previous research has examined the characteristics of deceptive calls but has mostly focused on staged emergency scenarios with contradictory findings. This study investigates the typical characteristics of hoax and genuine emergency calls in different types of emergency reports from Finland. The collected data consist of 110 authentic emergency calls, including 40 hoax calls and 70 genuine ones. Descriptive statistics were collected to identify the patterns in call duration, reported emergencies, the information provided during the initial phase of the call, and how calls ended. The gender of the caller, for whom the help is requested, and the presence of additional participants were also examined. Hoax calls usually emphasize urgent situations, and the narratives are generally less structured, less informative, and shorter in duration than genuine calls. This pattern suggests an overall tendency to minimize interaction with the dispatcher, especially among female callers. Gendered patterns found in this study indicate that male and female hoax callers may rely on different strategies when making a hoax call. Future research should investigate these differences systematically across caller demographics and emergency types.