Gay activist Adam Hoover posted an urgent plea online about his kidnapping – which turned out to be false.

The co-president of Marriage Equality Ohio wrote to his nearly 5,000 Facebook friends early Tuesday that he had been abducted:

“Please help me I’m in the trunk of my ford escort red 2000 gbh 2812. They said they are going to kill my family…I don’t want them to hear me. Please please call. I don’t want to die.”

The post also went out to Hoover’s 23,000 Twitter followers and included his mother’s phone number and their address, hoping for someone to contact her.

Ohio police soon found Hoover’s car, and then Hoover at a home nearby, unharmed.

Within two hours of Hoover’s post, he had been found, but the hashtag #FindAdamHoover had already spread online in a desperate attempt to find him. Gay Twitter personality Tyler Oakley also posted about the abduction to his 3.9 million followers.

“After a little while, we started getting indications that maybe this did not happen as he said it happened and then after the investigation was concluded, determined it was in fact, fabricated,” Lt. Jim Vetter told WLWT5 News.

“This is a young man dealing with some issues in his life right now and for whatever reason he decided to stage this kidnapping and abduction,” Vetter said. “The bottom line is, he made allegations that he was abducted and that turned out not to be true.”

In response to the hoax, the 20 year-old has been charged with making a false alarm which is a first-degree misdemeanor.

While he has not commented on the incident, Adam’s mother took to his Facebook page with this message on Tuesday morning:

Police did not reveal how they learned that Hoover had faked the kidnapping, and Hoover left the station at 7am Tuesday morning without making a comment to the media.

Adam’s mother posted again after the incident:

The police did not reveal a reason for Hoover’s false kidnapping claim.