To my loving and skeptical daughter,

OMG. It was just a joke. You knew it was.

I never intended to be taken seriously but somehow everyone but you took me seriously! 

Now I’ve gone and done it. I’ve won the billion-and-a-half-dollars lottery with a donated ticket.

Remember what I said on FB?

I'm asking all my friends and family to go out and buy ten dollars of MoreMillions tickets and donate them to me. You donate them to me by taking a picture of the ticket and sending it by FB email to me with the words: "I hereby donate this MoreMillions ticket to (put my name here)."

If I win with any of the tickets donated to me, I will share the prize with all those who donated tickets to me.

I have only two restrictions to accepting your ticket, a) you must be a relative of mine and/or a friend on my FB account and b) you must have sent it to me no later than 10 minutes before the numbers are drawn. The person who donates the winning ticket to me will receive two times the amount of compensation of other family and friends who participated. Of course, I will take the lion's share for handling all the details and miscellaneous expenses.

Let's not complicate this too much! Simply donate your ticket(s) to me and I will take care of the rest if and when I win.
No one should be rich alone, but we can all be rich together. Act Now!
Offer expires soon.

p.s. This offer is not valid in states in which it’s considered illegal to donate your ticket to me. It is also not valid if you send me expired tickets or last week's ticket or fraudulent tickets.”

It was all a joke. I figured the post script was a dead giveaway. But you know, they did it anyway.

I have forty-one friends on FB. That means, at most, I would have two hundred and five sets of numbers if everyone participated. I never imagined that anyone, let alone everyone but you, would donate to me. And now, one of those tickets has won. Your Aunt Imogene’s ticket to be precise.

We’ll need a big city accounting firm to help with the distributions and tax obligations. We’ll need a trust fund set up so that disbursements can occur annually for twenty years. I also think we need a public relations firm to manage the publicity and maintain the privacy of other family members.

I’m glad I stuck that line in about taking the lion’s share for myself. I figure a lion’s share is 30% of net proceeds after taxes and distribution expenses. That means about thirty percent for Uncle Sam and distribution plus thirty percent for me which still leaves seven hundred million dollars to distribute to forty people. Roughly sixteen million dollars to each person except for Aunt Imogene who gets more.

Thank God I don’t have more friends. It would be more complicated.

Thank God you‘re so smart, too. I would just muck this up by myself. You have the ability to suck up large amounts of information and turn it into a project plan for success. This is why you are the first one I’m reaching out to. I haven’t said a thing to your mother or sisters yet.

Fly out soon and we’ll begin planning when and how to tell everyone. We better see Aunt Imogene first to collect my ticket and put it in a safe place. Then we can plan on when to announce and claim the proceeds.

Thanks for your help.

Love you, Dad.

p.s. When everyone started to send me pix of their tix, I bought you a lottery ticket and gave it to myself. I knew you wouldn’t do it so I took care of you. It’s what Dad’s do. Welcome to the Family and Friends Millionaire Club!