Jevh Maravilla and Christian Toledo are two Texas college students who became viral sensations after hanging a fake poster of themselves up at their local McDonald’s for months. They never expected that it would pay off for them in a huge way!

It all started when Maravilla wanted to boost Asian representation in McDonald’s ads, so he teamed up with Toledo to snap photos of themselves holding various items from the fast food chain.

“We looked around and we saw these other posters on there and we saw there’s different ethnicities,” said Maravilla. “We saw that they were all people having fun and so we decided to represent ourselves as Asians to be up there as well.”

Once the poster was completed, Maravilla bought an old McDonald’s uniform from Goodwill and made a name tag that said “Regional Interior Coordinator” so that he could go to his local McDonald’s and hang it on a blank wall.

The prank quickly went so viral that a McDonald’s representative contacted Maravilla and Toledo and invited them to an event, but the two were skeptical.

“When he told me I was like, ‘Maybe this is a trap and maybe cops are going to be there,'” Toledo joked.

This past week, the two students appeared on The Ellen Degeneres show, where they were given a huge surprise! Host Ellen DeGeneres informed them that McDonald’s has agreed to pay each of them $25,000 and feature them in an ad campaign!

“McDonald’s loves customers like you and they are committed to diversity and want to represent all their customers so they’re going to feature you in a marketing campaign,” DeGeneres told them.

Watch the two students be given their big surprise in the video below!