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I think hoax is a perfectly adequate term. There are billions of people in the world, there's a near certainity that there will be someone, somewhere who will vaguely fit the profile of what scenario you wish to conjure up. But the scenario itself is still fictitious, a deliberate choice to misrepresent (and necessarily fabricate) information.
Even if you want to make the 'well, technically there was at least one dude somewhere saying something along those lines, so it's not a hoax' the obvious and immediate counter-argument is that the hoax is not the fact there is that one guy somewhere, but rather the hoax is the deliberate misreprentation of a non-credible threat as a credible threat, in a situation where it's obvious to anyone with a modicum of intelligence it's a non-credible threat, least of all supposed 'hate crime experts' like the ADL.
On principle, this is not dissimilar to a situation where someone sees a bunch of mischievous teenagers messing about with some paintball guns, this someone knows they're nothing but mischievous teenagers with paintball guns (who might even talk a big game but everyone including the someone knows are harmless), calling the police on them as an active shooter situtation,where people are being shot and 'potentally' killed then literally everyone believes and parrots the caller, up to the top level of government and media, no one does any due diligence investigating because it plays into their political incentives (an active shooter situation is great fodder for gun control politics). Oh, and it turns out the caller is a owner of a private security firm who tends to gets a lot of contracts after something like this occurs. What would you call that situation, if not a hoax?
A plot? A scheme?
Yeah, maybe like a scheme to maliciously deceive a mass audience... wait, that's a hoax...
I mean, the goal seems to be for money rather than pure mastery-of-reality, I guess it's a hoax in the same way as something like the jackalope and less like the normal conspiracy theory inflection the word "hoax" might have.
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