Skateboarder Erik Bragg posted to social media claiming that he is one of the three winners of the $1.6 billion Powerball Jackpot. It’s not yet confirmed by anyone, but here’s the photo he posted to Instagram.
https://www.instagram.com/p/BAgWxACSYZC/
Update: The ticket is fake. If the ticket were real, the letters ABCDE would correspond to different lines of numbers. Since he has only one line, the only thing that would appear is “A.”
For what it’s worth, we’ve taken a close look at picture of the winning ticket in photoshop plus a few other places and there’s nothing outright fishy about it. It is strange, however, that the numbers on his ticket are actually in the order that they were drawn in. As you may or may not know about the Powerball, the order of the numbers doesn’t matter at all.
Obviously we’ll have to wait for the authorities to confirm whether or not Erik (who is a real person with fantastic hair) is now actually a millionaire, but that didn’t stop someone with his likeness from taking over Twitter the morning after. Check out how many RT’s this has.
https://twitter.com/ThepowerballGuy/status/687653465179332608
Immediately after the announcement, a bunch of other accounts popped up with different instances of his name–all pretending to be Erik and asking for RT’s.
https://twitter.com/dude_duper/status/687658235332050944
https://twitter.com/guysthaIimit/status/687534471554437120
So let’s get right down to it: do we think he’s actually the winner? Personally, I don’t think so. As we mentioned before, Erik is actually already a well respected skateboarder who’s no stranger to social media and the internet. He’s good friends with celebrity skater Ryan Sheckler, and hell he even had a feature on VanityFair.com about his awesome haircut.
That’s why we think there’s a good chance that he jumped on the perfect chance to get his name out there and increase his followers. Right now this dude is sitting on almost 89K followers on Instagram.
Then again, how awesome would it be if the whole story was real? Skateboarder who never wanted to be rich in the first place enjoys millions and even donates some to the internet? That’s the kind of fantasy that makes the Powerball worth playing in the first place.