When Chris Williamson put $20 into cryptocurrency Rocket Bunny, he didn't expect to become a trillionaire overnight. Yet, temporarily at least, that appeared to be what happened.
The Georgia nursing school student had dabbled in cybercurrencies for around eight months and invested in the currency on Monday. On Tuesday, its value had soared to more than $1.4 trillion. Coinbase later confirmed to Newsweek that was not the actual amount, and in fact was due to a "display error."
"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,'" Williamson told Fox 5 Atlanta.
The student from Manchester, Georgia, then rushed onto the Coinbase cryptocurrency trading app, barely believing what he was seeing.
Williamson said that when he tried to move the currency into another wallet to withdraw, it wasn't showing the same price, so he contacted Coinbase.
Coinbase replied with a short answer saying it was looking into the issue, and 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," Williamson told the news network.
"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.
Williamson was expecting the large sum of money to quickly disappear from his account, but instead it grew. He determined that he bought into the correct online coin, and that it wasn't a scam.
The Georgia student even tweeted billionaire Elon Musk, Tesla and SpaceX CEO who frequently posts to social media about cryptocurrencies, hoping he could provide him advice about his newfound fortune.
"I thought for sure because he trolls people all the time," Williamson 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."
The student said if he had that kind of money, he would use it to help people—by taking care of his family, paying off his sisters' homes, and maybe start free medical clinics.
"That's a lot of money that I could never spend in a lifetime, so I would do good with it," Williamson said.
Williamson was told by Coinbase he could not withdraw the money from his account as it wasn't the actual amount. Staff at the app are working to resolve the issue.
Although the incident has provided him with a good story, Williamson believes that he amassed his 13-figure wealth through a glitch.
His friend, who lives in Jasper, Georgia, bought the exact same coin but didn't experience any issues. However, Williamson found others on an online message board that have had problems with it.
Update 6/21/21, 10:30 a.m. ET: The article has been updated with comments from Coinbase.
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Jack Dutton is a Newsweek Reporter based in Cape Town, South Africa. His focus is reporting on global politics and ... Read more
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