An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Winning the lottery isn't what brought Carrie Edwards her 15 minutes of fame. It was giving it all away. Standing alone in her kitchen one day in September, the Virginia woman was thunderstruck to discover she had won $150,000 in a Powerball drawing. As she was absorbing her windfall, she said, "I just heard as loud as you can hear God or whoever you believe in the universe just say, this is -- it's not your money." Then came a decision: She would donate it all to her three most cherished charities (source paywalled; alternative source). [...] Her journey to the lucky prize started when she walked into a 7-Eleven with a friend who wanted to buy two Powerball tickets. The jackpot for the Sept. 6 drawing was topping $1.7 billion, the second-largest amount ever. Edwards, 68, hardly ever played the lottery, but her friend was an active player who gave her two pieces of advice: Always buy a paper ticket, rather than getting them online. And the Powerball multiplier is a scam, don't do it. She ignored him on both accounts.
She created a Virginia Lottery account on her phone. Then, instead of the typical strategies of using family birthdays and lucky numbers, she went to ChatGPT -- which she had only recently started using for research -- and asked, "Do you have any winning numbers for me?" "Luck is luck," replied the chatbot. Then it gave numbers that she plugged in -- paying the extra dollar for the Power Play to multiply anything she might win. She initially thought luck wasn't on her side when she didn't win the massive jackpot. But what she didn't realize is that she'd picked the "draw two" option, meaning her numbers were reentered for the next drawing. When she got a notification on her phone that she had won, she said, she thought it was a scam, or maybe she'd won something small, like $10. Just to satisfy her curiosity, she logged into her account and saw that she had matched four of the five numbers plus the Powerball in that second drawing. It would have been a $50,000 payout, but the multiplier tripled her winnings.
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