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Strange things happen on the internet, which is both its power and its curse. The influence of the crowd is significant, and the most random of occurrences can take on a life of their own. Such a thing has started to happen on the Pokémon subreddit, where a 'rich and bored' user made a strange offer that many appear to have taken seriously.

In a thread titled "If I get 100 upvotes, I'll buy everyone who upvotes a copy of Sun and Moon", user PassingThroughRider made the simple statement, asking fellow Redditors to "leave a comment below after upvoting so I know to message you to send a copy." In a matter of hours it accumulated over 16000 upvotes. It's declining at the time of writing, for reasons we explain below.

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The original thread itself is quite something to read, with some debating whether it's a binding 'contract', and moderators are looking into the post; in reality there seems to be no realistic chance that a post like this can be considered binding. In a much smaller thread the same user set up an AMA and seems to admit that it's all a rather bad prank - in different comments they refer to memes, being rich 'in karma' and saying they're a 'poor student'. A couple of their posts explicitly make clear that it was a 's**tpost', which is a term of sorts for trolling.

Hundreds (probably thousands) bought into the post initially, but reality is starting to dawn as the upvote counter continues to drop. If something seems too good to be true, that's because it probably is.

It's a mad world.

Thanks to all that sent this in.

[source reddit.com]