Photos of people purporting to be lottery winners who are willing to share their prize with people who share their photos on Facebook are, unsurprisingly, not true.
Hoaxers are capitalising on the willingness of certain Facebook users to Like or Share pretty much anything they see on Facebook by tricking them into believing they have a second chance of getting their hands on the lottery prize. Or at least a chunk of it.
This less-than-believable hoax has been doing the social media rounds for a number of years, with many different pranksters getting in on the act. The pranksters will post photos of photoshopped or blurred lottery tickets and claim that sharing the photo – and helping making it go viral – will land you a chance of winning a lot of money.
And of course it will not, since no genuine lottery jackpot winner has ever done this, and also certainly will never do this. The problem with these types of online hoaxes is that they are exploiting for like-farming scams which can lead to more serious scams. Even if the original prankster only meant for their ruse to be harmless, this doesn’t stop more serious scammers hijacking the scam for more nefarious purposes.
Several popular examples of these photos have been spread across Facebook and Twitter over the years, with a handful of examples circulating in November 2012 after a large jackpot accumulated. However none of these photos were genuine and all of them were photoshopped.
It is unlikely that anyone will ever post a winning lottery ticket on Facebook or Twitter and give away a percentage for every share it gets. For one thing it is often very difficult to contact Facebook users who share a photo, especially since in many cases the number of shares reaches the hundreds of thousands and many users do not allow direct messages to be sent from Facebook pages meaning they could not be notified of their winnings.
Often legitimate pages such as pages belonging to local radio stations do hold promotions where they purchase a ticket and claim to share the winnings should that ticket win, and whilst these promotions are, in our opinion, flaky at best, many appear legitimate (but first make sure a legitimate page has posted the photo).
However there have been no legitimate cases of anyone posting a ticket that has already won and offer to share the winnings. All examples that we have seen have been digitally altered and are easily dismissible as hoaxes because they do not collaborate with information about the actual winners that is available to the public, most commonly the hoax images show tickets purchased in states that did not sell a winning ticket.
There is no point sharing or liking these photos, even if it’s under a “just in case” validation because they will never be genuine and Facebook users should be warned that in some instances sharing these hoaxes can help Facebook scammers make money since we have seen Facebook “likewhore” pages sharing these types of hoaxes in order to accumulate page fans for their page so they can sell it at a later date. See above link for details on that scam.
Check out some more recent hoaxes below….
This version spread in December 2013. In this photo our perpetrator didn’t even bother to Photoshop the ticket, rather just left it too blurred to be seen properly.
