‘Stranger Things’ fan catfished by fake Dacre Montgomery, sent scammer $10,000

A woman has claimed that her life was turned upside down after being catfished by a scammer pretending to be Stranger Things star Dacre Montgomery.

• READ MORE: ‘Stranger Things’ season four part one review: all the terrifying thrills you’ve come to expect

Appearing on the YouTube series Catfished, single mum McKayla from Kentucky revealed that she left her husband for “Montgomery” after the pair met on an online forum for creatives, adding that she even sent the scammer roughly $10,000 (£7,860).

McKayla said the two “hit it off, but of course I’m suspicious from the get go until he starts doing things that make me believe that he is who he is”.

She said “Montgomery” – who plays Billy Hargrove on the hit Netflix series – told her that he was on the verge of splitting from his model girlfriend Liv Pollock due to her controlling behaviour. McKayla, who was unhappy in her marriage with a “toxic” partner, said she empathised “because my ex-husband was that way”.

The scammer then informed McKayla that Pollock had control of his bank accounts, prompting her to fund his life for over a year.

McKayla said that she was convinced the scammer was Montgomery after they told her to watch Stranger Things season four, specifically the ‘Dear Billy’ episode that saw the return of the character, the night before the season debuted.

“And he showed up in that episode,” McKayla recalled. “I was like, well, who else would know that?”

She said the scammer would also send her poems that matched the writing style in Montgomery’s 2020 poetry collection, DKMH: Poems.

“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,” McKayla said. “These scammers, they just kind of come in and they leech off that.”

Split into two volumes, Stranger Things season four saw the introduction of telekinetic villain Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) as he terrorised and gruesomely murdered various teens in Hawkins, while Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) set out to regain her her powers.

In a four-star review of the season, NME wrote: While there are some gripes to be had with the penultimate season of the show, it still packs in all the terrifying thrills you’d expect, deftly blending horror and sci-fi to maximum effect while still allowing for some laughs among the bleakness. It’s a finely-tuned formula that’s given us yet another sublime season and, hopefully, one more to come.

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