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Immediately after the mid-January 2016 drawing that produced three winners in the record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot, intense public scrutiny was focused on gleaning the identities of the three parties holding tickets matching the winning numbers. Early news reports indicated that three winning tickets had been sold in California, Tennessee, and Florida, but as of 17 January 2016, only the Tennessee claimants (John and Lisa Robinson of Munford, Tennessee), had been publicly identified. Into the breach stepped myriad hoaxsters and fake news sites, offering up fictitious tales about the as-yet-identified winners. One such story reported that the Florida winner was a 32-year-old military widow named Candice Withers, in desperate need of money to feed her four children: The story was nothing more that a fabricated bit of clickbait intended to tugs at readers' heartstrings and generate traffic for its originator, United Media Publishing, a fake news site that had already successfully pranked many social media users with a fictional story about the alleged California Powerball winner. As of this writing, neither the Florida- nor the California-based winner who will be sharing one-third of the record $1.5 billion Powerball jackpot has been publicly identified.
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