The 911 call to Sacramento police dispatchers seemed real enough.

A man reported that a woman has told him she was kidnapped. He met her in a chat room on the Internet and the two had arranged a rendezvous.

"This was a kidnapping in progress," Sgt. Matt Young said of the Monday morning incident.

Dispatchers made contact with the woman on her cell phone and then alerted officers throughout south Sacramento.

"She tells us she is in the trunk of a car. She is whispering so as to not let her captors know she has a cell phone," Young said.

"She describes her abductors and their car in great detail. At one point they stopped at a McDonald's and we surround the restaurant," Young said. "Then she said they are at a house, a single-story ranch-style home with green trim. We surround that and find it empty."

Nearly two hours after the call came in at 8:30 a.m., and after mutual aid was requested from the Elk Grove Police Department, the California Highway Patrol and the Sacramento Sheriff's Department, nearly 60 officers discovered the call was a hoax.

"This was a person who got cold feet about meeting a date and this was how she decided to deal with it," Young said. "This has got to be one of the most egregious abuses of the 911 system."

Sara Elizabeth White, 20, of Turlock was arraigned Wednesday in Stanislaus County Superior Court on a misdemeanor charge of abusing the emergency dispatch services.

"This isn't a woman who has mental issues. She knew how we were responding," Young said of the homicide unit and a helicopter crew who were called and put on standby. "Thousands and thousands of dollars of resources were spent and for this to be a prank is outrageous."

During the two-hour police search, the woman even heightened the urgency of her phantom plight.

"She said she had asthma and was having difficulty breathing. We told her to hang on that we are going to save her. And all this time she is sitting in her living room," Young said.