Rosario Monachino
A Stranger Things fan left her husband and lost thousands of dollars after thinking she was talking to one of the stars of the show – but it turned out to be a scam.
The hit Netflix series is one of the most popular programmes available on the streaming service and has amassed millions of die-hard fans since debuting in 2016.
One woman thought she was in luck when one of the actors from the show started messaging her and showing interest in her.
But not everything was as it seemed…
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Featuring in the YouTube series Catfished, a single mother named McKayla spent over a year thinking she was messaging Dacre Montgomery – who plays Billy Hargrove in Stranger Things.
She explained how the pair ‘just really hit it off’ after she joined an online forum for creative people, shortly after separating from her ex-husband.
Despite being suspicious at first, the person she was talking to was ‘doing things’ that made her believe she was actually talking to Montgomery.
“I am obsessed with Stranger Things,” McKayla explains. “[His character] Billy is just this bully. He kind of comes in, tries to dominate, which is totally unlike his actual personality.”
In real life, Montgomery has been in a relationship with his model girlfriend Liv Pollock for six years, but the person McKayla was speaking to claimed their relationship was on the rocks and they were unhappy.
“He was venting to me after a few months about his partner, saying she is very controlling of him,” she recalls.
“He doesn’t get to do the things he wants to do. She’s always there. She’s always got to supervise.
“I kind of empathise with that because my ex-husband was that way.”
After speaking for about a year, the pair admitted that they had feelings for one another.
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McKayla continues: “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’.”
The person pretending to be the Power Rangers actor asked McKayla to keep their relationship quiet as he is ‘still with Liv’, but he claimed that they had ‘technically’ broken up.
The moment she became fully convinced that she was dating the real Montgomery was after they advised her to tune into the Stranger Things season 4 episode titled ‘Dear Billy’ – which saw the actor make a surprise return.
As he told her to watch it the night before the episode’s debut, she was certain she was talking to the real him as no one else would have that information in advance.
On top of that, she received poems in the style of Montgomery’s 2020 poetry collection ‘DKMH: Poems.’
McKayla added that she roughly sent $10,000 directly to the supposed actor, who claimed that he had a joint account with Pollock and she wouldn’t let him make any purchases of his own.
The victim didn’t ‘immediately dismiss’ the reason as she has gone through a similar situation with her ex.
However, after investigating McKayla’s story, the Catfished team found that Montgomery and Pollock had not broken up and the person she was talking to was a scammer.
They uncovered this as the signature the Elvis star had sent to her was fake and actually matched hundreds of cheques online that all have the same signature.
The scammer even lied about the meals he supposedly cooked, as one image of a lasagne that he sent her was actually taken from a recipe posted by Martha Stewart.
While McKayla was obviously heartbroken and disappointed, she was grateful that the truth came out about her online relationship.
She said: “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.
“These scammers, they just kind of come in and they leech off that.
“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.”
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