This guy created a Twitter bot that won 1,000 random contests
Hunter Scott, a Californian computer coder, created a Twitter bot that entered around 165,000 contests through the social media platform. His win-rate? Roughly one percent, which averages out to winning only around 1,000 of the contests.
Regardless, those are 1,000 prizes he didn’t have before embarking on his interesting journey.
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After roughly nine months of running the bot, enough people had reported Scott’s account and it was ultimately banned. “So at that point, I'd kind of gotten tired of it and just let it kind of end,” he told NPR.
While he never actually touched on the legality of what he did (many online contests prohibit the usage of bots), he assures you there’s no need to turn him in to the IRS. “I reported and paid taxes on all of the winnings I actually accepted/received,” he claimed in a dissertation on his experience.
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Interestingly enough, out of everything he won, his favorite item was a cowboy hat autographed by the stars of a Mexican soap opera he had never even heard of. “I love it because it really embodies the totally random outcome of these contests.”
You can check out a full list of Scott's winnings here.
