Crypto Currency Confusion: Georgia man wakes up a 'trillionaire'
MANCHESTER, Ga. - Imagine going to sleep as an average, hard-working American only to wake up in the morning a trillionaire.
"I’ve been dabbling in the crypto and stuff now for maybe eight months and you know we found some of these, I guess it's just like play coins, things people make," said Chris Williamson
Williamson said he sank about $20 into a cryptocurrency called Rocket Bunny and it might have lived up to its name Tuesday morning, breeding like, well, bunnies rapidly overnight.
"I woke up, it's like 9 a.m. and I always check my phone to check how my crypto to see how it's doing and I like looked at it, I'm waking up, and I'm just like, ‘Naw, I'm sleeping," the Georgia nursing school student said. "I look at it again and I'm like… at that point I fall out of my bed literally, and I run to my desk and I'm logging into the Coinbase app and stuff and I’m talking to my friends, got him on the phone and I’m like, 'Dude, you need to help me figure out how to sell this now!' He's like, 'Chris, something wrong."
Williamson said when he attempted to move the cryptocurrency to another wallet, but it wasn’t showing the same price. That’s when contacted Coinbase which replied with a short answer acknowledging they were looking into the issue. He said he also tried to contact Rocket Bunny but never heard anything back.
"So, that's when I'm like, 'Okay, I'm just going to have fun with it at this point.' So, I went to Twitter," said Williamson.
"You know when you look at it, it's like you know there's no way I’m ever going to get this amount of money," he said, adding that he jokingly wrote Coinbase he would settle for 5-cents on the dollar.
Williamson said he has been expecting the large sum to go away at any time, but instead, it has been growing over the past few days.
"I got a counter and I actually did a screen recording showing the number go up and up and up," he said.
He did check to make sure he bought into the correct online coin since there are some scammers out there and did determine it was legitimate. But of course, he can’t stop thinking about if his 13-digit dividends were real.
"The ongoing joke right now between me and like my friends in Coinbase and one of the emails I sent them was like, 'Look, I need y'all to let me know what's going on because I got a mega-yacht company ready to build me a penguin-shaped yacht," he said laughing. "So, you know, let me know."
He said he has even tweeted billionaire Elon Musk with the hope he can help answer this trillion-dollar question.
"I thought for sure because he trolls people all the time," he said. "I am hoping he's actually saw it and maybe he's been following it, but I don't know. That is an Elon Musk wallet."
Williamson said if he really had money like that, he would end up doing what he has done most of his life which to help people. He would make sure his family is cared for, paying off his sisters’ homes, and maybe start free clinics.
"That's a lot of money that I could never spend in a lifetime, so I would do good with it," he said.
Williamson said he is sure the whole thing is a glitch and for now his account is frozen, so he cannot withdraw, purchase, or trade while he waits to hear back from the company.
His friend, who lives in Jasper, Georgia bought the exact same coin but didn't experience a penguin-shaped mega yacht-buying windfall of crypto coin. He's since found others on an online message board that have experienced issues.
He said regardless of the outcome, this will make a great story for the future that for a few days in the summer of 2021, he was a trillionaire.
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