There’s little doubt that winning the lottery – well, winning big on the lottery – has the potential to change your life forever. Gone are the days of worrying about whether you’ll make next month’s rent, dreading your kid coming home with another letter about a school trip and working in a job you hate. Instead, you can say hello to lounging around at leisure, eating smoked salmon for breakfast, caviar for lunch and steak for dinner.

But with newfound wealth, comes a tough decision: do you go public or keep it all a secret? In essence: Do you risk attracting leeches only interested in your winnings and everyone that wants to borrow a dollar or two before payday? Or do you try to play it cool, expect nobody to notice when you suddenly upgrade to a Ferrari and hope your neighbors don’t decide to report you to police suspecting you’re a drug dealer?



After winning a staggering $180,900,000 ($1.4 million USD) on Jamaica’s Supreme Ventures Super Lotto draw, one woman decided that she would have to take the latter path – and she found a rather cheeky way to hide her identity.

Rather than plumping for a sneaky disguise or just simply staying out of sight, the woman in question instead decided to go for a decidedly modern take and wear a mask featuring an emoji only ever normally used when you’re trying to flirt, or booty calling someone at 3 am.



The woman, who has only been identified at N. Gray, turned up to the press conference that celebrated her win and to sign the papers that make everything official, in a plastic winky-emoji mask. Although she was probably still fairly recognizable to those who knew her, considering that her hair and clothing were still very much on display, she did a good job of covering her face.



During the gathering, she posed for the cameras, giving a thumbs up with one hand while holding up her giant check with the other – to be fair, while we suspect she was probably smiling underneath the mask too, you can’t say she didn’t look happy about it.

She even pulled out Jamaican national hero Usain Bolt’s legendary lightning strike celebration pose.



According to local newspaper The Jamaica Star, the woman chose to shield her face from view due to her concern over high crime rates in the country, presumably not wanting to make herself a target. While it’s quite common for winners in countries such as the US and the UK to go public, in Jamaica it is actually fairly common for lottery winners to keep their identity private.



So what is “Ms Winkyface” planning to spend her winnings on? Well, first she’s got to do the important things: “I am elated, because I was drowning in debt. I started buying Super Lotto in January… Now [that] I’ve won, I want to clear my debt, invest” she told The Gleaner.

She also added that she wanted do something pretty standard for a lottery winner, but one that many people will never be able to afford, saying: “I want to do some traveling.”



That wasn’t it though, because the winner also wants to use her cash supply to make a difference within her community.

“I would like to construct a community center for the youths in my community, so they can engage in something productive”. She’s even got a great – and very fitting – idea for how this project might work , saying that she would like it to be “somewhere where they can do information technology.” I see a theme emerging here…



While the company that run the lotto say that they do encourage people to go public with their winnings, those that choose not to are becoming increasingly creative with their disguises: “People have been coming with their own disguises. They usually don’t need our help, and they are usually very creative, perhaps beyond anything that we could think of or imagine, and it has been very effective over the years,” she told The Jamaica Star.

This is also increasingly common in other countries. In 2016, a Chinese lotto winner collected his $40 million USD prize while dressed in a full monkey costume, which actually didn’t look too dissimilar from the emoji monkey.




As disguises go, you’ve got to admit that this one was pretty original, albeit not that all-encompassing. And unfortunately, for what probably started out as a bit of fun, the winner probably attracted more media and public attention than she ever thought possible – which kind of defeats the point of it really. Top points for effort, though.

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