Photo Courtesy: Ashmita Kunwar

Powerball, previously known as Lotto America, is a lottery game offered in the US. Its first drawing was held on April 22, 1992. Every Wednesday and Saturday night at 10:59 p.m., five white balls are drawn out of a drum with 69 balls and one red ball out of a drum with 26 red balls.

The jackpot is won by matching five white balls in any order and the red ball. The prize of the red Power play is given in either an annuity for 29 years or total cash at once. The second prize can be won by matching at least three white balls in any order. The total prize for this is $1,000,000 paid in cash without annuity option. In January 13, 2016, The Powerball draw produced the largest lottery jackpot in history with a $1.586 billion jackpot. The final amount received by the winner, sadly will only be a fraction of the amount after all the tax deductions.

Recently, a viral post began to circulate on social networking sites claiming that if the winner would split the prize money ($1.3 billion at that time) with every American citizen then each person would get $4.33 million, thus eradicating poverty in the US. The only problem with this post is that the calculations are wrong.  This was first posted by Livesosa, an Arkansas based singer on Facebook. This wrong information created a lot of buzz on the social media with 1.4 million shares and almost 1 million likes on Facebook.

Contents of social media, most of the times, needs to be carefully looked at and its authenticity needs to be properly verified. Just because someone famous has shared something doesn’t mean that it is accurate, as we see from the Powerball story above.