Fake News: $451 Million Lottery Winner Shane Missler NOT Giving Away $5,000 To Retweeters
Tue, 16 Jan 2018 13:54:37 UTC by Maarten Schenk
A Twitter account purporting to be owned by Mega Millions winner Shane Missler put out a tweet saying the first 50,000 followers to retweet and like it would get $5,000. Missler won the $451 million jackpot on january 5th 2018 but opted for a lump sum payment of $281.2 million instead of payment in installments.
Unfortunately the tweet (archived here) is bogus:
The twitter account @Shane_Missler was only registered on January 15th 2018 while Shane's real account @TheShaneMissler was registered in February 2016. He already used it to put out a warning about fake accounts:
That didn't seem to stop many people from taking a chance anyway: at the moment of writing the fake tweet was approaching 10,000 retweets. Weirdly the number of likes was only at 7,700 so at least 2,300 people were apparently not even smart enough to follow the full instructions of a hoax tweet.
Updates:
Jan 16, 2018 5:47:16 PM GMT:
It appears Twitter has disabled the account of the most popular version of the hoax and someone else took over the nickname. However new variations of the fake tweet are taking its place:
Jan 16, 2018 2:24:11 PM GMT:
They keep coming:
Jan 16, 2018 2:23:50 PM GMT:
And one more:
Jan 16, 2018 2:09:18 PM GMT:
Here's another bogus tweet from a fake account: