If you weren't wired thousands of dollars this weekend, it's probably because you didn't ask a Twitter teen who said he or she was giving away a fortune to whomever wanted it. Or, it's because everyone was faking it.

Yesterday, Twitter became to be dominated by @princessthot, who claimed to be a teenage girl looking to send $1,000 from her dad's $23 million Paypal account to the first 10,000 people to retweet this tweet.

Later, after saying that her mentions had essentially crashed, the growing horde was directed to use the hashtag #AskHannaForCash. Though one would obviously assume this was a flagrant hoax, @princessthot kept up the ruse, and eventually began retweeting people claiming they had received cash.

Et cetera. This is all pretty stupid, but @princessthot, like the kid who fucked a Hot Pocket, became a fleetingly galvanizing figure because of the nonchalant sense of humor she had about her destruction.

Late in the night, she claimed that the police stormed her home and arrested her father, which is pretty much when the entire game obviously fell apart, and that was before Daily Dot dug up evidence that seems to confirm our obvious suspicions about the veracity of @princessthot.

Still, as a disposable spectacle, the saga of @princessthot was fun. For better or worse, these are the types of events that Twitter thrives on: a growing number of users chatting at or across each other about a certain event that an even larger number of users probably aren't even following. When we don't have the Academy Awards on, we invent something like this.

@princessthot was a copycat, in any event. On Friday, a kid named Andrew Kuczynski said he would be giving away part of a fortune he won in the Powerball. He posted this screencap as proof, though if you read the first letter of each name from top to bottom, it spells out "I LOVE KRISTINA."

The weekend was also the logical evolution of Esurance's $1.5 million Twitter giveaway during the night of the Super Bowl. Still, @princessthot's stunt was the most magnetic yet, and another reminder that the fastest-spreading news stories don't necessarily need the press, as Buzzfeed's Hunter Schwarz found out.

[stock image via Shutterstock]