Darren Jason Watkins Jr., the 21-year-old streamer known as IShowSpeed, handed a nursing student named Ben a $250,000 check on October 28 after Ben became the first person to track him down during a livestreamed scavenger hunt across New York City.
The prize formed the grand finale of Dr. Squatch’s Speedrun: Million Dollar Mission, a nine-week campaign that offered a total of $1 million across 25 challenges in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Watkins had hidden somewhere in the city with the golden briefcase while his stream slowly released GPS coordinate digits every ten minutes. Five costumed Dr. Squatch characters stationed around the boroughs carried extra numbers that participants could photograph to speed up the search. The hunt ran from roughly 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Eastern Time. Ben reached the location in a little over an hour.
On the rooftop where they met, Watkins held up a novelty check as confetti fell over the skyline. In the clip that spread across X, he first told Ben the whole thing was a prank. Then he corrected himself. “You just won $250,000! Congratulations, bro! You found me.” He noted that Ben is a nursing student who previously had about $2,000 in his account and had skipped exam prep to join the hunt. “Now you’re gonna have $250,000.” Chat flooded with W’s. Watkins asked his name, repeated “Ben,” and told viewers to spam it.
Watkins, born January 21, 2005, in Cincinnati, Ohio, built one of the largest audiences in streaming through high-energy gaming, soccer reactions, and unscripted IRL streams that regularly pull hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. The Dr. Squatch partnership, developed with the creative agency MSCHF, leaned into that same interactive style. Earlier stages of the campaign hid cash-filled golden soap bars in cities from Los Angeles to Miami to London and Sydney, ran social-media content missions, and distributed scratch-off tickets through TikTok Shop loot boxes. The New York finale replaced the briefcase hunt with a live, real-time manhunt that anyone watching the stream could follow even if they were not in the city, as detailed in coverage from Complex.
Ben’s last name and school have not been publicly confirmed beyond the stream. What is clear from the footage and contemporaneous posts by accounts such as Daily Loud and Dexerto is that he arrived first, met Watkins on the rooftop, and walked away with the largest single prize of the entire campaign. The moment fits a pattern in Watkins’s streams: sudden, large-scale giveaways that turn ordinary fans into the center of the broadcast for a few minutes, similar to other streamer generosity moments covered on the site such as Adin Ross’s high-value fan gifts.
For Ben, those minutes translated into a sum that, by his own numbers on camera, multiplied his bank balance more than a hundredfold in a single afternoon.
