INDEPENDENCE, Mo. — Once again, the old adage rings true. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. An Independence man is experiencing that firsthand.

Recently, a post on Facebook has been widely shared saying CEO Mark Zuckerberg is giving 45 million dollars away to 1,000 random people.

Zack Owens said he never saw the post, but he received a message on Sunday on Facebook saying he won $500,000.

Owens said he was very excited by the news and thought it was his lucky day. He gave the contact, who claimed to work for Facebook, his home address and phone number. He even got a certificate from the messenger.

“At first I thought it was real. I was all excited, you know. I could use the money. I’m not going to lie,” Owens said. “I’m laid up from being injured at work, and I was all excited.”

But he got suspicious when he was asked to send $365 to cover insurance and deliveries fees.

“They kept telling me this is not a scam and that I needed to send the money, that I needed to confirm now, and wouldn’t leave me alone,” Owens recalled. “And that’s when I told them that I was going to call the cops.”

Christopher Davis, a Senior Intelligence Analyst with Optiv in Overland Park, said people should never give out personal information to a stranger.

“Always be leery. If you don’t the know the people, if you don’t know what they’re about, if you don’t know anything about them, just like you would meet a stranger in the street, treat it the same way,” Davis explained.

He said people need to use their head and trust their gut and don’t let hope lead them astray.

Snopes.com, a popular website known for exposing online hoaxes, debunked the scam back on Dec. 3.