I found £4,000 on Oxford Street after a scavenger hunt

Loughborough design grad Mark Hoyle scooped £4k this afternoon after his wife spotted a competition on Twitter. 

In what can only be described as the lottery crossed with the Da Vinci Code, the London based indie band Moones launched a scavenger hunt style competition last night as part of their album launch.

They tweeted a link to a Youtube live feed and announced that the lucky fan to find a piece of chewing gum on the wall in the video would win £4k.

On Friday afternoon London designer and Loughborough grad, who doesn’t remember how old he is, Mark Hoyle, was crowned the lucky winner of the virtual scavenger hunt when he found the chewing gum on a wall about one minute away from where he used to work.

The 28-ish year old told The Tab that the location rang a bell. He said: “I used to drink around the Oxford Street area after work so I thought I recognised the location. But it wasn’t there.

“I was just about to give up and was heading back to work but as I walking, I totally randomly just saw it, I guess.”

He said he found a small silver disk with some random letters on it: “I was there for about five minutes trying to figure what to do, then the security came out from the building it was on and told me to leave. They clearly had no idea what was going on.

“I was like ‘errr I dont know if I’m allowed to leave’, I didn’t want to walk off and give this up, I didn’t want someone else to identify it and beat me to it.”

When asked if he was a big fan of Moones, Mark laughed and said: “I’m not a fan of the band. My wife sent me the link and said ‘you’re good at a challenges and know central London pretty well’.”

Mark explained how initially the challenge panicked him: “I was in a mind of my own took a screenshot on my phone and when I noticed it, I didn’t know what i had to do.

“I was like fuck it, looking on my phone. It felt like an eternity.”

When he found the Holy Grail of chewing gum, he rang his wife straight away and told her to look on the live stream. Immediately spotting her husband on the video, Mark’s wife just screamed and said: “Oh my god!”.

He’s only spoken to the band on Twitter but is potentially meeting them this evening in the hope that the £4k is not a hoax. Mark says he’s not having a biggie with the money, and is instead putting it towards a car and his baby, which is due on April 1st.

He said: “My mates all want me to get the beers in and pay for their night out because they don’t believe me.

“I’m just gonna send them a picture of me with all the money to prove it.”