KarunaNews Story

Winning the lottery isn’t what brought Carrie Edwards her 15 minutes of fame. It was giving it all away. Standing in her kitchen one day in September, the Virginia woman was thunderstruck to discover she had won $150,000 in a Powerball drawing. “I just heard as loud as you can hear God or whoever you believe in the universe just say, this is — it’s not your money.” She decided to donate it all to her three most cherished charities. Two of them were soon dealing with increased demand as the federal government shut down at the end of that month. It began when she walked into a 7-Eleven with a friend who wanted to buy two Powerball tickets. The jackpot for Sept. 6 was topping $1.7 billion, the second-largest amount ever. Edwards, 68, created a Virginia Lottery account on her phone and asked ChatGPT for winning numbers which she plugged them in, paying the extra dollar for the Power Play to multiply anything she might win. Because she’d picked the “draw two” option, her numbers were reentered for the next drawing and matched four of the five numbers plus the Powerball in that second drawing. The multiplier tripled her winnings.