What happens at 1 billion?
Robin Hood scam, Alternate reality game, Marketing visionnaire, Friend or Foe? What came to be the European Internet’s most mysterious money-gifting scheme.
Image Description: A screenshot of the home page of the Website “What happens at 1 billion?” is presented here with the same phrase written in a pre-2000s-style computer font, big and centered on the screen in white, spelling out the numbers in full digits.
Screenshot taken from https://whathappensat1000000000.com/
For the past few days, a strange website from a business registered in Frankfurt, Germany, had been giving out money after their website’s visitors would enter a code prompted on the screen, leading to the input of an email address. A PayPal credit of initially 5 Euros, which went on to be gifted periodically at lower values of 4 Euros, and 3 Euros, could instantly be claimed after the message “Check your email. Claim what’s yours” would be prompted on the screen to confirm the successful first-time code input. Followed by this would be the verification of the gift via email. Once verified via personal email account and gift claim via PayPal, every new code input on the website matched with submitting an email address would automatically deposit the code’s value to the participant’s PayPal account.
Image Description: A screenshot of the home page of the Website “What happens at 1 billion?” is presented here with the phrase “Check your email. Claim what is yours”, in a pre-2000s-style computer font, medium-sized, centered on the screen, in white.
Screenshot taken from https://whathappensat1000000000.com/
While at least one person online claimed to have secure sources that verified the website’s money-gifting as some sort of Ponzi scheme or reselling of stolen credit card value, others confirmed to not have cared about the panic, as they made over 600 Euros from prompting the codes. One of the users of a few forums on Reddit trying to dissect the reasons behind the money-gifting scheme even shared a screenshot of a seemingly private response from the official what1bn profile on the same platform, which read: “Free money is not always a scam”.
Other profiles on the same platform shared evidence of the campaign’s social repercussions. Social media accounts such as the one from the official Instagram page of the event aggregator website Rausgegangen, for example, started sharing screenshots from messages received from many people reporting on the “What happens at 1 billion?” advertisement posters being seen around Berlin, as well as photographic proof from others that verified the confirmation of letter receipt through their home mail with promotional material from the same campaign along with a 5 Euro bill.
Followed by billboards in Berlin and other major cities in Europe, such as Paris and Vienna, the campaign attracted much attention online, but surprisingly, up to the moment of this writing, only two German newspapers, the Berliner Morgenpost and the Berliner Kurier, and the tech and consumer portal Chip seemed to have caught up to the scoop. A search on Google News revealed that only one online media news outlet had reported on this story. In France, the tech journalists Nicolas Lellouche and Bogdan Bodnar from Numerama seem to have been the ones doing the heavy reporting, together with other French news portals such as BFMTV, News Day FR, Justgeek and Capital. The French front of the campaign also seems to have been strengthened by paid promotional posts from French influencers such as Léo Duff, Xelito Belek, and Romain Lanery (also a Trade Republic ambassador).
From the evening of November 13th until the following day’s evenings, it seemed that the gifting scheme accelerated the velocity with which the money would be given: instead of being made available for a few minutes, now the progress bar had been reaching the “No money left” level within less than a couple of minutes. Could that have been a forced time limit to avoid allowing participants to input more than one email address, and thus receive more credit? Or was it simply that thousands of people had caught up to the campaign and started to frantically observe the website as it would be updated with new codes for input? Or could it have been merely a strategy from that campaign’s creators to enhance the feeling of being in a competition and drive the adrenaline of its participants up?
Some have claimed online that the use of bots by certain participants made it possible for them to claim many codes at once, which in turn contributed to the time for claiming the reward shortening considerably. I guess we will never know the true reasons for why the code redeeming process started happening faster.
Image Description: A screenshot of the home page of the Website “What happens at 1 billion?” is presented here with a number counting from the evening of November 13th displaying the number 999.902.390 million in a pre-2000s-style computer font, medium-sized, centered on the screen, in white, together with the message “Too late. Wait for the next code_” inside a red text field. These elements are followed by a number of empty progress count bars, as well as by another message, this time in smaller white letters: “No money left”.
Screenshot taken from https://whathappensat1000000000.com/
Here’s a list of all the codes provided on the website’s screen between November 12th and 14th:
1 - Claim What Is Yours
2 - It Belongs to You
3 - Paris
4 - Growth
5 - Go further
6 - For later
7 - You decide
8 - Amsterdam
9 - Every month
10 - Secure
11 - For your future
12 - Berlin
13 - Choose
14 - For everyone
15 - Vienna
16 - 365 days
17 - Build With It
18 - Start Acting
19 - Every Year
20 - Lisbon
21 - Passive
22 - New Normal
23 - Safety
24 - Madrid
25 - Every Day
26 - The New Standard
27 - Milan
28 - Think new
29 - Act now
30 - Claim What Is Yours
As the countdown to 1 billion approached, everybody seems to have had the same question in mind: What is the company/entity/endeavour sending us 5 Euros every couple of hours? And what was the catch behind this? Would I need to return the money? Well, the drum roll can start now.
The answer to “What happens at 1 billion?”, revealed after 8pm on November 14th, was finally displayed on the website: the initiative was indeed an advertisement, created by the German online broker Trade Republic, based in Berlin, which months prior had made headlines for reaching 1 million card users in just five months, making it one of the leading European investment and savings companies. Accordingly, the reason for the free 1 billion Euro gift had been to prove a point central to that business company’s mission: to make banking fair and simple by passing the ECB interest rate to its customers.
Image Description: A screen recording of the website, after completion of the 1 billion Euro gifted to participants in the campaign all over Europe, reveals its purpose as a marketing campaign.
Displayed on the website, a text being typed out via animation in vintage computer font stated the goals of the campaign, as well as set the tone for the brand and its initiative, in trying to reach new customers. The text read:
Banks serve themselves, not you.
We are a Republic. A thing of the people.
At Trade Republic, we make banking simple and fair. We pass the ECB interest rate to you, uncapped.
Because earning a few cents every day amounts to something big.
So big, it makes a dent.
This month, we passed one billion Euros in interest paid to you.
1,000,000,000 € more in your pockets.
This was followed by a link code offering to “Tap to get 15 Euros in stocks” upon successful creation of a new account with Trade Republic. A Robin Hood bank for the people? Could that be real?
Seems like Trade Republic is eager to let us find out.
Image Description: After tapping on the 15 Euros reedemable QR-Code, a message could be seen on Trade Republic’s website, in German: “The average European household receives only 0.37% interest per year. We pass on the full ECB interest rate of currently 3.25% directly to our customers. In total: more than 1 billion euros in interest for our customers in less than 2 years.”