A TIME waster who forced emergency services to spend thousands of pounds on needless rescue missions told a court it was because he wanted to make new friends.

Serial hoaxer Michael Cumiskey sparked a £5,000 hillside rescue operation in July last year after falsely claiming he had injured himself and could not walk off the Eildon Hills, near Roxburgh in Scotland.

The “extremely vulnerable” North-East man’s 999 call was responded to by four fire appliances, 17 firefighters, six mountain rescue personnel, an ambulance and police officers in an operation that cost £5,022.

Cumiskey – who is well known to emergency services across the North-East - was taken Borders General Hospital, where medics found he had no injuries and quickly released him.

When police carried out a check into the 22-year-old’s background, they discovered that he had previously been airlifted from Ben Nevis and found reports of him being rescued by coastguards at Dumbarton, Torquay, Scarborough and Dover.

The Northern Echo can reveal that emergency services across the North-East have been called repeatedly by Cumiskey, with specific warnings having been issued in regard to his problematic behaviour in the past.

On Monday, he appeared at Selkirk Sheriff Court in relation to the July incident and pleaded guilty to causing annoyance and inconvenience to the emergency services by sending messages he knew to be false.

Natalie Paterson, mitigating, described Cumiskey, whose address in court was given as Stockton, as “an extremely vulnerable person” as the court heard he suffered from ADHD and Asperger’s Syndrome.

After being detained at a bus stop near the hospital, Cumiskey – also understood to have links to Darlington – admitted in a police interview that he had pretended to slip to get attention and later said he was ashamed of his actions.

He said: “I like having people around me, I want people to care for me, to talk to and listen to my problems.

“I enjoy the attention, I only have one friend and it is a way of making new friends.”

Sheriff Janys Scott handed him a 12 month community order and said: “You have caused a great deal of trouble, this is not the way to go about seeking help.”

A spokesman for the Great North Air Ambulance Service could not confirm whether or not they had been called upon to rescue Cumiskey, due to patient confidentiality.

However, the spokesman said any hoax call had a potentially huge impact on the emergency services.

He said: “Although a fairly rare occurrence, hoax calls can have a devastating impact.

“From a financial perspective, each call out can cost around £5,000 for our service alone, so when you take into account the involvement of mountain rescue teams and ambulance services as well, we are talking huge amounts of money.

“But the primary concern is that while we are responding to a hoax, there may be a patient elsewhere who is in real need of our services. That’s when lives are put at risk.”