Facebook photo a Powerball prank? A million users hedge bets
A Facebook user posts a photo of himself with a "winning" Powerball ticket and asks fellow Facebookers to share it for a chance at a million bucks. Does he get a response? We'll give you one guess.
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If you can't be the winner of a multimillion-dollar jackpot, you might as well snag your 15 minutes of fame -- and have a little fun -- for not winning it.
That seems to have been the thinking of one Nolan Daniels, who posted a photo of himself on Facebook last night, holding what he claimed was one of the winning Powerball tickets. Daniels asked his fellow Facebookers to share the photo, saying he'd give a random sharer a million-dollar slice of the pie.
Problem is, as Gawker points out, the numbers on the ticket aren't in numerical order, as the Powerball fine print specifies they would be ("The tickets print the white ball numbers [the first five numbers] in numerical order"). Also, The Arizona Republic tweeted that the winning ticket that was sold in Fountain Hills, Ariz. (where Daniels claims to have bought his "ticket") was a $10 quick pick ticket, whereas Daniels' "ticket" shows a $2 price tag. On top of that, the Arizona winner may well have been pegged, via security camera, as someone who looks nothing like Daniels.
So is it a hoax? Well, as of this writing, nearly a million Facebookers aren't taking any chances. They've shared the photo, hoping for a million-dollar consolation prize.
And Daniels? Well, even if he doesn't turn out to be filthy rich, he does seem to have secured at least a little notoriety. Who knows how far this will take him -- as one of his Facebook friends says in a comment, "Nolan you are gonna end up on jay leno! Well played my friend."