A Kentucky woman was catfished by a person pretending to be Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery.
The woman, whose name is McKayla, revealed in an episode of the YouTube series Catfished that she forked over around $10,000 to someone she met online, who convinced her that they were Montgomery. She said she left her husband when she thought she had met the actor online in an online forum for creatives.
"I am obsessed with Stranger Things," McKayla said in the episode. "[His character] Billy is just this bully. He kind of comes in, tries to dominate, which is totally unlike his actual personality."
She shared that while she was “suspicious from the get-go,” the person soon started “doing things that make me believe” he was Montgomery. She said she “bonded” with this person when he said that his partner is “very controlling” and doesn’t allow him to “do things he wants to do.” Montgomery is dating model Liv Pollock.
"I kind of empathize with that because my ex-husband was that way," McKayla, who is a single mom, said. "At about a year after we kind of admitted feelings for each other, he said, you know, 'There's nothing like, you know, the feeling of love when it's reciprocated.' And I said, 'What?' And he said, 'I'm indirectly asking you out.'"
What really sold her was when the person told her to tune into the Stranger Things "Dear Billy" episode, in which Montgomery's character appears despite having died in a previous epsiode. The fact that he seemed to know what was going to happen made her think that she was in fact talking to the real Montgomery.
The person asked McKayla to be his girlfriend but that she had to “keep it quiet” because he was “still with Liv.” He convinced McKayla to send him thousands of dollars, explaining that he had a joint account with Pollock and she wouldn’t let him buy anything on his own—something that resonated with McKayla, since her ex behaved in a similar way.
"If you're someone like me, you're afraid of abandonment and you're a real big people pleaser and you're very co-dependent," she said. "These scammers, they just kind of come in and they leech off that."
She added, "It's a dopamine fix every time you wake up, every time you go to bed, several hours a day. It's a fix. It's a hit."
