She duped thousands in 140 characters or less.
A New Jersey teen who vanished Sunday night after tweeting that a stranger entered her home is likely a runaway, cops said yesterday.
Kara Alongi, 16, send out a misspelled message Sunday night saying, “There is someone in my hour [house] ecall 911.”
Alongi’s alarmed parents arrived home an hour later and called cops when they couldn’t find her.
But skeptical detectives found no signs of forced entry or stolen property at the suburban Clark, NJ, home.
A police dog traced Alongi’s scent out of the home’s back door, through a neighbor’s yard and onto a nearby block.
Within a few hours, the situation sparked a social-media hurricane — Alongi suddenly had 94,000 followers on her Twitter page, and Facebook pages dedicated to her rescue began to sprout.
But authorities gradually dumped the intruder angle after a cab company said that one of its drivers had dropped off a girl matching Alongi’s description at a local train station.
The teen called the taxi at roughly the same time she was typing up the tall-tale tweet, cops said.
It’s unclear where she headed after being left at the station, and officials are still trying to locate her.
“We’re really worried about her,” her aunt Bobbie-Anne Williams told The Post. “She’s never done anything like this before.”
Cops said that she left her cellphone at home in an effort to bolster her story.
The Clark Police Department was flooded with thousands of phone calls and tips after word of the bogus abduction deluged the Internet.
Cops finally doused the frenzy with a press release that said Alongi likely split town on her own and that the mysterious stranger never existed.
“It’s just a waste of time,” said a police source. “And with Twitter, it just makes it worse with everyone calling in. A lot of resources go into this.”
Alongi’s newly formed army of Twitter allies rapidly turned on their former cyberfriend as word of the apparent hoax leaked out.
Kara Alongi “is the epitome of everything that’s wrong with the world today,” fumed follower Adam Scott.
Playing off her newly formed kidnapping hashtag, one follower wrote: “#helpfindkara(’s parents a belt.)” while another quipped: “#helpfindkara (a lawyer.)”
The Twitter frenzy even led to a hashtag that falsely claimed that Alongi had been located.
Authorities speculated that she may be extending her unannounced vacation because she fears arrest for her false claims.
Clark cops said that they were not planning to arrest the teen and just wanted her safely back home.
Alongi’s neighbors described the petite Arthur Johnson HS student as a quiet, sensitive girl whom they would never have pegged as a brazen Internet hoaxer.