A single mum in the US says she was catfished out of US$10,000 and left her husband after a scammer posing as Perth-raised Hollywood star Dacre Montgomery duped her.
The woman called McKayla says she fell hook, line and sinker for the fraudster who she connected with on a creative forum.
McKayla admits at first she was suspicious but was later convinced by the scammer that they really were the 28-year-old star, famed for playing Billy Hargrove in Netflix show Stranger Things.
The trickster told her about the episode “Dear Billy” before it aired.
“And he showed up in that episode,” she told YouTube series Catfished. “I was like, well, who else would know that?”
The woman says the scammer, claiming to be Montgomery, also insisted his relationship with model Liv Pollock was on the rocks and made up that the beauty controlled all his money.
McKayla said her “ex-husband was that way” too with money, so she left the “toxic” relationship. She sent the “actor” money out of empathy to keep them afloat.
She blamed feeling needy for falling for the hoax.
“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 said. “These scammers, they just kind of come in and they leech off that.”