Fact Check

Lottery Winner Shane Missler Giving Away Money for Retweets?

A Twitter account promising $5000 for retweets doesn't actually belong to the 20-year-old Mega Millions winner.

Published Jan. 16, 2018

 (Ruslan Ivantsov / Shutterstock  )
Image Via Ruslan Ivantsov / Shutterstock
Claim:
Lottery winner Shane Missler is giving away $5000 to the first 50,000 followers that retweet his post.

Shortly after news broke that 20-year-old Floridian Shane Missler had won the $451 million Mega Millions jackpot in January 2018, someone using a fake Twitter account to pose as Missler tweeted that they would give $5000 to the first 50,000 people to retweet:

One hint that this account is bogus is that, as of this writing, it has only been active for about 15 hours, suggesting that the account created solely to take advantage of Missler's surge in popularity.

This hoax message mirrors similar scams which promise large sums of money in exchange for sharing or liking posts on social media. There are a number of ways to spot these "something for nothing" scams, but social media users would benefit from simply keeping the old adage "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is" in mind while browsing the internet.

Shane Missler did say that he wanted to do some "good for humanity" after winning the lottery, but he hasn't announced any specific plans as of this writing. The lottery winner did use his genuine Twitter account, however, to warn social media users about some of the imposter accounts that had started posing as him:

Sources

Fox 61.   "20-Year-Old Jackpot Winner Hopes to do ‘Good for Humanity.'"     15 January 2018.

Dan Evon is a former writer for Snopes.