“I’m obsessed with ‘Stranger Things,'” says McKayla. The American from Kentucky is a big fan of the Netflix series. This is probably one of the reasons why she was vulnerable to the scam of online scammers. How they made her believe that she was in a relationship with a star from the series, she tells on the YouTube channel “Catfished”.
It all started when the filmmaker, who only wants to give her first name, registered on an online forum to exchange ideas with other artists. There she received a message from a user who called himself “DK MH”. After a few chats, he finally posed as Dacre Montgomery: actor from “Stranger Things”, where he embodies the sunny boy Billy Hargrove. They got along very well from the start, but she was skeptical at first, says McKayla.
But she soon gave up this reluctance. The supposed star opened up to her, complaining to her about his girlfriend – although the two had never met. They didn’t even talk on the phone to each other. Still, as the relationship grew, McKayla grew more and more confident — even wire money to him on a regular basis after the alleged actor claimed his girlfriend was controlling his finances.
“That’s one thing that really brought us closer together,” McKayla says in retrospect. A controlling partner, a toxic relationship, that reminded her of her own husband. After the two chatted for about a year, the ‘Stranger Things’ star rumored to have asked her to be his girlfriend. However, she is not allowed to talk to anyone about the fact that he is still with his girlfriend in public, but has long since separated from her. McKayla was only too happy to oblige, for a year she thought she was dating the actor. She also bought from him that nothing was going on between him and his girlfriend: Montgomery rarely posts photos with her on his Instagram account, she found.
The couple still hadn’t seen each other once. Nevertheless, she went into the relationship fully and, under pressure from her online friend, she also separated from her husband. Since then she has lived as a single mother with her seven-year-old daughter. The fake Dacre kept asking Montgomery for money, McKayla sent him about $10,000 in total.
Looking back, she realizes that the scammer targeted her vulnerable points. “Love makes you do crazy, stupid, irrational things. If, like me, you’re afraid of abandonment and a very clingy yes man,” she warns others. “The scammers take advantage of that.”
Source: “Catfished” on Youtube, TMZ
