A phone-charging myth once kept emergency operators busy responding to thousands of pointless 999 calls from people who wrongly believe dialing the emergency number will boost their dying phone batteries.
The urban legend, which gained traction in UK BlackBerry forums around 2012, claimed that calling 999 (Britain's emergency number) would override a phone's low battery shutdown and provide extra power. While BlackBerry phones did have a feature that preserved emergency calling capability when batteries were critically low, this morphed into a widespread misconception that such calls could actually charge the device.
As reported in The Mirror, Derbyshire Police issued alerts after seeing a surge in abandoned 999 calls. "For every silent or aborted 999 call received, the operators have to call the person back to make sure there is no emergency," they explained. "Dialing 999 does NOT charge mobile batteries," Derbyshire Police stated firmly in their warning to the public. "These silent calls waste police time that could potentially block responses to real emergencies." The surge in 999 calls due to this myth has since died down.
See also: Why is it so hard to make a phone call in emergency situations?
