Avid ‘Stranger Things’ Fan Reveals She Was Catfished By A Fake Dacre Montgomery

One avid Stranger Things enthusiast revealed she was catfished online by someone pretending to be Dacre Montgomery, the Australian actor who plays the Netflix series’ residential bad boy Billy Hargrove, per Entertainment Weekly.

McKayla, a single mom from Kentucky, shared her story on “Scamfish,” a segment on the YouTube channel Catfished, explaining that the two met on an online forum for artists more than a year ago, and never met in person. She began to have “doubts about everything after funding Dacre’s life for over a year.”

“But the thing is, when I tallied it all up, it was $10,000-ish dollars,” she highlighted.

While McKayla said they “hit it off,” she “wondered” why “a famous guy would want money from someone like [her].” However, she noted that he started doing things that made her “believe he is who he is,” including “venting” to [her] about his allegedly “controlling” partner, model Liv Pollock.

“I kinda empathized with that because my ex-husband was that way,” she said.

The Dacre faker, who said he was breaking up with Pollock and claimed she was in control of his bank accounts, told McKayla that in order to be with him, she had to leave her husband.

She separated from her husband after Dacre’s request, but also because “he [was] very toxic,” sharing that during “her marriage, he was limiting her creativity, so she decided to express her art online.”

Despite various red flags, one instance that reinforced her beliefs of it really being Montgomery was when he told her to watch episode 4 of Season 4, which was entitled “Dear Billy,” the day before it came out. When “he showed up” in the episode, McKayla was stunned.

“I was like, well, who else would know that?” she exclaimed.

He also sent her poems that emulated his “style of writing” in the real Montgomery’s poetry collection DKMH: Poems, which was released in October 2020.

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

Decider reached out to one of Montgomery’s representatives for comment, but did not hear back in time of publication.

Watch the video of McKayla’s story above.

The first four seasons of Stranger Things are streaming on Netflix.