An Arizona man may have been trying to bring wishful thinking into some semblance of reality when he posted a shopped photo claiming to hold the winning ticket in a record lottery jackpot. He ended up setting a different record when his post went viral, shared by more than 2 million Facebook users.
Nolan Ryan Daniels put a photo of himself with a ticket supposedly showing the winning numbers from a $588 million Powerball drawing. He included a caption saying he’d never have to work again and asked Facebook users to share the post for the chance to get $1 million, which he offered to reward to a user at random. According to news reports, the post continued to spread at a rate of 100 shares a minute even several days after it had been revealed as a hoax. The 2 million shares it managed to drum up beat out Facebook’s previous record holder, a 2011 New York Times interactive post on the Japan tsunami that was shared by 600,000 users.
Trying to explain Daniel’s motivation, his brother Derek Daniels told a local paper, “I think he craves the love from people.”
Source: Savannah Morning News
