Although the annual repetition of the marketing strategy has made it trivial, McDonald’s accounts certify that the Monopoly promotion was the second most beneficial promotion for the company, only behind the Happy Meal. The collaboration with the popular board game distributed a whopping $24 million in big prizes between 1989 and 2001. However, they all ended up benefiting one person.
Patented in 1935, although it had an earlier origin that had little to do with the capitalist exaltation it ended up becoming, Monopoly was one of those globally known brands in the mid-80s. To capitalize on its success, McDonald’s invited its consumers to participate in a contest where, through instant prizes or the need to complete street collections, they gave away everything from video game consoles to salaries of $50,000 a year for 20 years. Delighted with the success of the promotion, the company’s executives could not imagine how much they were being duped. It took 12 years to discover what was happening.
How the FBI Ended Up at McDonald’s Doorstep
In March 2001, amidst a mysterious aura and without explaining the reason at any time, the FBI summoned several McDonald’s executives, sat them in a room with a magnetic board, and an officer began placing photos of people while asking if they knew the individuals who were being meticulously added.
Using their names to facilitate recognition, as the board filled with more than 50 people, they were assured that all of them had won to some extent part of the prizes distributed with the Monopoly promotion. After asking if they knew any relationship between them, and making it clear that the last names did not reveal anything unusual, the officer began drawing lines to show why they had been brought there.
Stepfathers and sons, neighbors, co-workers in the same company, godparents… Almost all of them had some kind of relationship despite being separated by miles or diverging into different groups. In one way or another, all the lines ended up in the same person, a former police officer named Jerome Jacobson. However, that name was not on the McDonald’s employee database.
After working for a year in the Hollywood Police Department, an injury to his wrist during an altercation, and an extended sick leave due to additional health problems he had been dragging since his youth, forced the police to dismiss Jacobson. After a period of recovery, his wife got him a job as a private security manager within the Dittler Brothers firm, and as he climbed positions within the company, he ended up winning a position as the head of one of their biggest clients: Simon Marketing. They were the company in charge of promoting McDonald’s actions.
Jacobson’s Great Monopoly Fraud at McDonald’s
Among other duties, Jacobson was tasked with overseeing the security of McDonald’s Monopoly prizes. Checking even that the factory workers where the prizes were printed did not store prizes in their shoes, he quickly gained the company’s trust and ended up in charge of transporting the big prizes to their destinations. It is worth noting that security around the prizes was strict, with winning cards stored in envelopes sealed with a special sticker, and an external audit manager scrutinizing the movement of all the envelopes.
However, the smaller prizes did not receive the same level of attention, so despite living a luxurious life and traveling across the country in first class to deliver the envelopes, at some point Jacobson succumbed to temptation and started giving small prizes to acquaintances. To avoid suspicion, they found a third party to cash it in with the condition of sharing part of the prize with Jacobson later.
However, at one point Jacobson picked up an envelope from one of the factories they collaborated with in Hong Kong and, upon opening it, discovered that special stickers used to seal the envelopes were inside. Armed with this valuable information, the security manager decided to take it a step further. Taking advantage of men’s room trips at the airport, making it impossible for the accompanying auditor to suspect anything, he would open the envelopes, keep the big prize, insert a small one in its place, and apply one of his stickers.
Over a scam that lasted 12 years, Jacobson enlisted friends, swindlers, mobsters, convicts, and other shady characters to distribute more than 24 million prizes ranging from cash millions to high-end vehicles. Without anyone suspecting a thing, he ended up pocketing 50% or more of each of the big prizes from the Monopoly and McDonald’s promotion.
Luckily, through an anonymous informant who contacted the FBI to alert them about the fraud, in 2000 the agency initiated an investigation to analyze the prize winners and establish a possible connection between them. On August 22, 2001, Jerome Jacobson and over 50 others were arrested for fraud, turning the McDonald’s and Monopoly case into one of the most famous scams in history.
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