Monopoly ManWhy is this weird illustration taking over the internet?

For reasons that no-one can understand, that image now makes up one in every 120 images on Imgur, the internet’s leading photo repository.

The illustration now known as 'Monopoly Man'
(gizmodo) 

Back in 2011, illustrator Erica Glasier created an artwork for a Forbes article titled ‘The Bank of Facebook: Currency, Identity, Reputation’.

For reasons that no-one can understand, that image now makes up one in every 120 images on Imgur, the internet’s leading photo repository.

Sources say the phenomenon seems to have been first spotted by a Reddit user back in February, and more recently analyzed in detail by TheGamble.

According to reports, he analyzed a million random Imgur URLs, and recorded what was found at each one. Monopoly Man, as Glasier’s image is now being called, showed up 3,568 times.

That’s 0.833% of all Imgur images, meaning that it’s probably been uploaded around 3.2 million times — an insanely high number for anything that’s not the work of some secret Illuminati botnet.