Is it a crime to PRETEND you’ve been to the police and got an incident number?

[Madeupballs]

Just that…

someone trying to intimidate me. Says he has made a report to the police and they have given him a crime number and that he has (from the goodness of his heart) asked them not to contact me directly. But has supplied a crime number which on closer examination is made up. All made up, in fact.

is that unlawful? Sort of misrepresenting the police?

It depends what he hopes to get out of the lie.

"Obtaining a pecuniary advantage by deception" is a crime, so if he would be in any way financially better off if his lies are believed then yes that's a crime.

(Edited as I hadn't seen the 00:06 update)

So yes he is attempting to defraud you of your legitimate court-ordered funds and intimidate you into shutting up and leaving him alone.

I think you should go to the police, explain what has happened and ask both for guidance as to how you can pursue this legitimate debt without actually becoming guilty of harassment, and also asking them to assess whether his lies amount to attempting to obtain a pecuniary advantage by deception.

Why isn't your solicitor dealing with this? Or taking court action to recover the money?

My solicitor, as of yesterday afternoon, is aware of this and I’m waiting for a response. We are going back to court to enforce the terms of the Consent Order, but in order to do that, there’s a process in the run up to it to say “this is what’s coming.” I think it’s called being “on notice” and has to be done so that the court can see that I tried to resolve it. (As it happens he also refused to engage in mediation too) Anyway he won’t respond to anything he doesn’t like or doesn’t want to deal with - including the expenses he should cover, hence my saying “fine, I’ll send them to your company.” And that clearly got his attention because he said that was harassment and that he had been to the police. Of course, a bill for your child’s expenses being sent to an alternative official registered address (he’s a director) is unpleasant and embarrassing but doesn’t constitute harassment.

He already has form for coercive control, police documented, so this is part of a wider picture. But anyway what I wanted to know is if it’s a crime to pretend you’ve seen the police and made up an incident number.

TLDR, he’s a div. It’s with the lawyers now.

On the contrary my neighbour tried something like this with me. I reported it to the police and they paid him a visit.

That’s not correct.

if a crime has been committed that can and will investigate even if the victim doesn’t want them to.

very common eg. In domestic abuse cases where the victim changes her mind and doesn’t want her partner arrested for knocking the shit out of her. They can continue with the investigation, and hopefully secure a conviction even without support. Makes it much harder of course, but can be done.

it’s not anyone’s choice whether something is investigated. A lot of reports of nuisance, third party reports with no victim, insurance cases etc will be recorded and left on file. But you can’t report something and request it isn’t taken further.

Yes you can.

I have been in this situation.

I did say it depends on the crime though. I'm sure there may well be situations where you can't.

It would be illegal if someone made up a fake crime number in order to, eg, claim insurance for stolen phone or something, because that would be fraud - they'd be doing it for direct financial gain and deliberately deceiving the insurance company to get money they weren't entitled to. But in the circumstances you've described, it wouldn't be a crime... just a massive great fib, told by a complete idiot in an attempt to manipulate you. Like you say... he's a div. What a ridiculous little man!

An ex of mine had form for this sort of thing. I once watched him literally fake a phone call to the police in front of me. He had been violent and I had defended myself (he got me in a headlock and I couldn't breathe so I instinctively bit him - obviously not my finest hour but I was close to passing out, and I didn't even break the skin) and he sat there pretending to phone the police, even though it was blatantly obvious there was nobody on the other end of the line. He actually sat there, doing really bad acting, saying things like 'Yes, Sergeant, if you could send a WPC round to take her away, I'd very much appreciate it'. The whole time I was thinking 'Christ, I'm actually embarrassed for you at this point'