A woman has been charged after confessing she faked her own abduction to cover up dropping out of college.
The 23-year-old Pennsylvania student, Chloe Stein, has been reprimanded for the elaborate hoax and was arrested earlier this week (2 May) under four separate misdemeanours all in an effort to hide the fact she wasn't going to graduate this year.
It's clear that this student really took the phrase 'college drop-out' to a whole new level.
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The Penn State student was arrested on Tuesday evening after faking her own abduction which triggered a state-wide search for the allegedly missing 20-something.
Stein was last heard from on Monday evening (1 May), approximately 10:30pm, when she was texting her boyfriend whilst driving home from work.
She messaged to tell him that she was getting pulled over by a cop, state police explained in a conference.
Upon receiving the alarming message, her boyfriend then tried to contact Stein several times but was unable to reach her.
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Pennsylvania state police later heard from the student's family that Stein's vehicle, a Volkswagen Beetle, was found eerily abandoned on Radebaugh Road in the North Greengate Road area.
As soon as the car was discovered, Stein's family reported a missing person declaration to the authorities which then sparked a huge search for her.
Speaking at a news conference on Tuesday, State Police Trooper, Steve Limani, revealed that the police department forked out a fortune in the search for Stein.
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Limani said officials spent 'thousands of dollars' looking for her and even enlisted a helicopter to fly over the area in the hopes of getting an aerial view.
However, Stein's ruse first started to unravel when a tip came in on Tuesday evening that the 'missing' woman was actually safe and sound at a home in Jeannette, just 30 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.
When officers arrived at the scene, they were shocked to find the student inside the residence and subsequently took her in for questioning.
During her interrogation, Stein told police she was pulled over and abducted 'by an unknown male who posed as a police officer'.
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She also alleged that the man had a firearm and that he blindfolded her before taking her to various locations in the surrounding area.
However, police grew suspicious of Stein's account of events.
Before they even rocked up to the Jeanette residence, police had already received some vital information from Penn State University officials about the woman who confirmed she was currently enrolled at the university.
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"During the course of that phone call we found out that she had not been attending college for quite some time — almost at the point where it’s over a year, maybe two — and graduation was right around the corner," Limani explained.
"That really led us in the direction that at any point of time there was no police interaction, there was no pull over," he continued. "None of that happened."
And suspicions only grew after officers noticed some major inconsistencies when they questioned Stein some more.
When confronted about them, Stein totally cracked and admitted that she had fabricated all of the information pertaining to the incident'.
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Limani explained that Stein engineered the hefty hoax to cover up the fact she was no longer attending the educational institute.
"The fact of not going to school apparently for so long and maybe disappointing people was the reasoning behind it," he said.
Court records show that Stein was charged with false alarm to a public safety agency, falsely reporting an offense that did not occur, obstructing administration of law, and disorderly conduct for the ruse which ended up costing the local department a small fortune.
Stein is set to appear before a judge later this month (25 May) for a preliminary hearing.
Rhiannon Ingle