Police warning after 19 hoax calls from this Telford phone box
It looks like just another phone box, but this is also the centre of criminal activity that is wasting the time of emergency services and putting lives at risk.
Police have identified this box in Telford as the
.
They say children are to blame and have called on parents to help deal with the problem, which could end up with youngsters facing the courts.
A number of calls have been traced to the public phone in Ayr Close, in Leegomery, Telford. In the last year more than 20 hoax calls have been made from it.
Police officers from the Hadley and Leegomery Safer Neighbourhood Team have handed out leaflets in the area asking for witnesses to come forward.
The phone box has also been damaged by spray paint, which has been reported to BT.
Constable Rob Hughes said: "In the last year calls to police as well as calls to the fire service were made from the call box.
"Some of the calls are made from children, who were abusive to the call handler.
"It is important that the people making these calls realise that a fire engine sent to a false call puts lives in danger.
"We will continue to monitor the problem and take action against anyone caught committing an offence."
The number of public phoneboxes across Shropshire has dwindled in recent years with the rise in mobile phone use.
Constable Hughes said people living on the estate had actually called for this box to be removed, saying it is an eyesore and attracts anti-social behaviour.
Emergency services serving Shropshire say hoax calls remain an ongoing problem, which waste time, money and potentially divert services away from people who need them.
It was revealed this week that one hoax caller from Shropshire made more than 170 bogus 999 calls to West Midlands Ambulance Service in the space of 14 months.
The man, who has not been named but is said to be from the Market Drayton area, made the string of calls between October 2014 and December last year, police have revealed. None of the calls warranted an ambulance call out.
The nuisance caller, who has also contacted police on 80 separate occasions, has been questioned by officers and warned of the potential consequences of his actions.
Ambulance chiefs today said 91 ambulance shifts were effectively lost in Shropshire during the 2014/15 financial year due to 10 people making frequent 999 calls at a cost of £190,000 to the service.
Anyone with information about the nuisance calls being made in Telford is asked to call police on 101.
