How two brothers went from nearly jobless to multi-millionaires with a bizarre crypto bet

On the morning of April 17, two brothers in Westchester, New York, woke up to learn that they had become millionaires overnight, thanks to an unlikely wager on a cryptocurrency that was originally created as a joke.

Tommy, 38, and James, 42, who have asked CNN not to publish their last names to protect their anonymity, had put a few hundred bucks into an odd digital asset called shiba inu coin — a spinoff of dogecoin, so basically a parody of a parody. One coin was worth a fraction of a cent, but a friend, who happened to be a crypto expert, told them he believed it could be a big moneymaker. "I kind of thought about bitcoin — that was once a fraction of a penny and now it's tens of thousands of dollars, and this happens to people, it's possible," Tommy said. "I trusted my friend and I figured if it went to zero, that's OK. I thought of it as a lotto ticket that wouldn't expire."