Thousands Facebook Users Chase Fake $1 Million From Powerball ‘Winner’

What would make more than 500,000 Facebook users share one guy’s photoshopped picture of a ticket with the winning Powerball numbers? Raise your little pinky, do your best Dr. Evil voice, and say it with me now: one meeeellion dollars.

“Looks like I won’t be going to work EVER!” user Nolan Daniels posted to the social network on Thursday night, captioning the fake ticket photo above. “Share this photo and I will give a random person 1 million dollars!”

The numbers were a fairly obvious Photoshop job, and the notion of someone who just won $239 million inviting all sorts of trouble by posting such a picture on Facebook is faintly ridiculous. But to confirm the fakery, as Gawker points out, you need only know that Powerball tickets are printed in numerical order.

Now, Facebook isn’t exactly short of falsehoods and misguided re-posting, as you may have noticed earlier this week when a “copyright notice” went viral. But Daniels’ post shows what happens when you add the promise of a large amount of cash to the mix.

Indeed, in the time it took to write this story, the number of shares on the picture went from 396,000 to more than 581,000. By the time you’re reading it, the number is probably far higher.
Check the comments on the picture, however, and you’ll see a number of Daniels’ friends posting increasingly nervous notes as the share count climbs higher and higher. And no wonder. Offering $1 million that doesn’t exist may not be a scam in this case, as what you’re tricking out of people (their re-shares) isn’t exactly worth anything.

But it does walk right up to the borderline between joke and scam — and may invite retribution. Daniels doesn’t share his location with non-friends. We advise he keep it that way.

mashable.com