Kendra Licari, the Michigan mother who secretly terrorized her own teenage daughter, Lauryn, with anonymous messages for nearly two years, may have unknowingly revealed her identity through one chilling detail: the use of her daughter’s intimate nickname, “Lo.”
The revelation is at the center of Unknown Number: The High School Catfish, Netflix’s latest true crime documentary, which unpacks the bizarre double life of Licari and how she fooled friends, family, and law enforcement to make her daughter’s life hell.
Now, viewers are asking themselves one question: Why did a woman so obsessed with remaining anonymous decide to use a nickname only close family and friends knew?
Experts revealed the true reason behind Kendra Licari using her daughter’s intimate nickname while catfishing her
According to psychologist Dannielle Haig, the answer may lie in the very intimacy Licari was pretending to sever.
“Nicknames carry strong emotional weight; they’re intimate and often tied to identity,” Haig said in an interview.
“Even when someone is trying to hide, those slips into familiar language can emerge unconsciously.”
For Haig, the use of “Lo” was a form of “psychological leakage,” a phenomenon that’s likely to emerge when a person interacts with someone familiar while trying to stay incognito.
“There may have been an underlying desire to be recognised, or at least to maintain that emotional closeness with her daughter, even through the deception,” she said.
But that wasn’t the only slip. Her husband later discovered that Kendra had been lying to her husband and others about her employment. She had been fired from her job a year prior, but continued pretending she worked.
That deception gave her the time, and cover, to spend up to eight hours a day sending anonymous messages, often 40–50 per day.
Licari told her daughter to take her own life, made fun of her physique, and even tormented her boyfriend
Authorities later discovered that Licari was using a spoofing app to mask her phone number, allowing her to change it constantly. Every time Lauryn or Owen blocked one, another would appear in its place.
The texts were grotesque and personal. Some told Lauryn to take her own life. Others attacked her body. One message, purporting to come from a classmate, told her to “finish yourself or we will #bang.”
@netflix all of the text messages in this film are real. WHO exactly was anonymously cyberbullying this high schooler for 2 years? Unknown Number: The High School Catfish is now playing. #HighSchoolCatfish ♬ original sound – Netflix
Some messages claimed Owen wanted to be with someone else, and even suggested he would be with the sender if Lauryn died.
Licari eventually pled guilty to two felony counts of stalking a minor. The charges reflected both the overwhelming volume of her messages and the calculated emotional torment she carried out for nearly two years.
Prosecutors revealed how she didn’t stop at Lauryn. She also targeted Lauryn’s boyfriend Owen, and later went after his new girlfriend more than a year after the breakup.
In 2023, Licari was sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. In a controversial turn of events, she served just over a year before being released on parole in August 2024.
Her early release disappointed many, given the scope and persistence of her actions.
Licari said she started the catfishing operation to protect her daughter from online harassment, a statement that would later be proven false
I’m watching Unknown Number: The High School Catfish right now and bitch the way my jaw just fucking dropped and I threw my phone across the room. pic.twitter.com/CN8pTaAZFL
— chris evans (@notcapnamerica) August 30, 2025
Kendra Licari’s excuse, as stated in the documentary, was that she didn’t initiate the anonymous harassment, but rather inserted herself into it after it had already begun.
She claimed that when the texts first started arriving, she saw them as a mystery that needed solving. According to her, she began sending messages herself in the hopes that Lauryn or Owen might reply with something like, “Is this so-and-so?”
But investigators weren’t convinced by the idea that a concerned mother would send dozens of graphic and violent messages to her own daughter in some misguided attempt to uncover the culprit.
Image credits: Netflix
The FBI eventually tracked the original messages to an IP address tied directly to Kendra’s home, dismantling her version of events.
There was never evidence of a third party.
In the end, the usage of her daughter’s nickname, her involvement in her intimate relationship via tormenting Owen, and the length of the torment were all signs of a deeper psychological fixation: emotional dominance.
“Vile.” Licari’s behavior left many viewers speechless
