British man Richard William Cove called medical hotline 1,200 times to satisfy his foot fetish
According to police, a taxpayer-funded medical hotline was repeatedly contacted by a British man with a foot fetish, posing as an elderly woman in an attempt to force the operators to talk about their feet.
According to the police, 45-year-old Richard William Cove, a resident of Worthing, called the National Health Service (NHS) 1,263 times over the course of two years. The number 111 connects callers to a non-emergency version of 911 and offers assistance.
Authorities claimed that between April 2019 and April 2021, calls to 111 about foot fetish incurred service fees exceeding $30,000.
“He admitted making all the calls, and that they were all for his own enjoyment and personal benefit,” in a statement on Wednesday, Sussex Police’s David Quayle made reference to.
“He said he had a sexual foot fetish which he indulged during most of the calls,” he added.
In an apparent attempt to get operators to talk about their feet, Cove reportedly called the hotline, provided a variety of false addresses, usually masking his voice, and pretended to be a “elderly woman” discussing fictitious foot issues. Across the calls he used a string of aliases — including the on-the-nose pseudonym “Michael Foot” — and became so notorious to operators that staff came to know him simply as “The Foot Fetish Caller.”
The foot-obsessive prank caller was tracked down by authorities after NHS 111 received a complaint from a person complaining that they were constantly getting follow-up calls from the hotline even though they had never requested assistance, according to Sussex Police.
Authorities revealed that the grievance ultimately came from a person who had been used as a fictitious contact in Cove’s fraudulent hotline calls. Ambulances were dispatched to the addresses in response to more fraudulent phone calls, police said. In all, at least six ambulances were sent out, and on one occasion firefighters broke down a resident’s front door because they believed a life was at risk.
On Tuesday, Cove entered a guilty plea in court to the charge of malicious communications. He will be sentenced on September 13.
When that hearing arrived on September 13, 2021, Worthing Magistrates’ Court handed Cove — a 45-year-old buyer of Boundary Road in the Heene area of Worthing — a 16-week prison sentence suspended for 24 months. The chair of the bench, Andrew White, said the sheer volume of calls and the cost to the health service justified going beyond the usual sentencing guidelines, telling Cove the impact had been “colossal” and had put innocent people at risk. The court ordered Cove to carry out 200 hours of unpaid work, complete 30 rehabilitation activity days, join a sex offender treatment programme, and pay £2,000 in compensation to the NHS — a sum that included reimbursing the ambulance service roughly £250 for a replacement front door. Investigators put the total cost of his calls at £21,869.21. David Davis, the South East Coast Ambulance Service’s head of integrated governance, condemned the conduct as a “depraved exploitation” of call handlers’ good nature, warning that even a single malicious call diverts resources from patients in genuine need.
The suspended sentence did not end Cove’s behavior. Years later he resurfaced — this time targeting Sussex Police’s 101 non-emergency line. Posing again as an elderly woman, using false names such as “Helen Cheeseman,” he placed more than 30 calls between June 2023 and September 2024, reporting trivial matters before steering conversations toward call handlers’ feet and trying to coax them into saying phrases like “cheesy feet” and “smelly feet.” On a single day he rang the line 60 times with his number withheld. Investigators said he deliberately fixated on female officers, including some working in departments handling serious sexual offences and online child abuse, squandering more than three hours of police time. Cove, by then 49, pleaded guilty to malicious communications at Worthing Magistrates’ Court on April 8, 2025, and on July 7, 2025 received a 10-week prison sentence suspended for 24 months. He was also issued a five-year Criminal Behaviour Order barring him from contacting 999 except in a genuine emergency and requiring that he identify himself by his real name and stop withholding his number.
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