Admit it, we’ve all done crank calls during our dumb days of youth, and some of us even made it out alive pranking the police hotline.
Not being sober and crank calling the cops however, isn’t a good idea at all — and it’s one that can land you some serious jail time, as Yeo Cheng Tee recently learned. The 47-year-old man will have to serve five weeks in jail for drunk dialling the “999” police hotline and telling the operator that he was, in his words, “going to be dead”.
The Straits Times reported that Yeo admitted to calling the cops on May 16 with the intent to annoy the emergency services. Feeling a little down after a drinking session, he called the number and told an officer of the Police Operations Command Centre that he was going to be dead that night, adding that he was exhausted, and had been cheated. Then he hung up.
The police traced his call to a pay phone (those things still exist?) at Block 6A along Boon Tiong Road, but no one was around when the cops arrived.
Investigations revealed that similar crank calls had been made by Yeo in the past. Police confronted him at his home in Jalan Bukit Ho Swee, and he admitted to calling the hotline after feeling drunk and “sad about his life situation”.
The man could have faced up to a year in jail and/or a $5,000 fine.
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