As someone who worked at a park district, this is 100% true and such a big problem. Those fuckers grow to be like 18 inches long and have thousands of babies.
Someone dumped a couple they got at a fair into one of our ponds and within a few years they were nearly the only life left in the entire pond. They eat anything and everything in their path and decimate local ecosystems. They're the freahwater equivalent of locusts.
We ended up electrifying the entire pond, scooping them all up, and rebuilding the whole natural ecosystem back up from scratch. You can't do that with a lake tho