Single mom loses $10,000 thinking she was talking to a 'Stranger Things' actor: "We hit it off..."
In an age when everything from banking to shopping and even networking f happening online, scammers are coming up with innovative ploys, making it harder for people as well as businesses to detect scams. Many schemes also involve impersonating celebrities to fool people into investing in dubious assets. One of them was a single mother, who fell victim to an online romance scam pulled off by someone pretending to be Dacre Montgomery, who plays Billy Hargrove from the hit Netflix show "Stranger Things." According to Entertainment Weekly, The single mother claimed that her life was turned upside down after she was catfished by the scammer.
McKayla from Kentucky said that she even left her husband for the scammer after the two met on an online forum for creative people, adding that she went on to send the scammer $10,000. She said that they 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," according to Catfished, a YouTube series. She claimed that the man who was pretending to be "Montgomery," told her that he and his model girlfriend Liv Pollock were on the verge of a split due to Pollock's controlling behavior. McKayla, who was in an unhappy marriage, with a partner who she describes as toxic, said she empathized with the fake celeb "because my ex-husband was that way." Posing as "Montgomery," the scammer informed her that Pollock controlled his bank accounts, and convinced her to fund his lifestyle for more than a year.
The single mom said she became convinced that the scammer was Montgomery after they told her to tune into "Stranger Things" season 4's "Dear Billy" episode that saw the return of the character, the night before the episode debuted. "And he showed up in that episode," McKayla recalled. "I was like, well, who else would know that?" 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," McKayla admitted. "These scammers, they just kind of come in and they leech off that."
McKayla also shared another instance that convinced her. She said that after she bought a copy of Montgomery's book, DKMH: Poems by Dacre Montgomery, the scammer would send her additional poems that she believed matched Montgomery's writing style. Revealing why she agreed to send him money after claims about his girlfriend controlling their account, she said, "I understood that point because my ex was very controlling with our money."
She started by sending $100 to $200 gift cards to the scammer and eventually ended up sending cards worth $10,000, which the scammer was supposedly using to secretly open a separate bank account to eventually leave his girlfriend
"Love makes you do crazy, stupid, irrational things, I promise. And trauma does one heck of a thing to a person. So instead of judging that person on why they did that to a total stranger that they had never met, maybe look and see if that person has been traumatized by something," McKayla said.
