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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
Hello. We took a little time off for the holidays so there will not be a new episode this week. But I didn't want to leave you empty-handed, so here's what we're going to do. Actually, let me tell you a quick story.
On July 28th, 2018, the Daily Beast published a fantastic article by Jeff Mache about a former cop that had rigged the McDonald's Monopoly game to essentially steal millions of dollars. You know, the little game pieces you peel off your french fries. Yeah, anyway, it's a crazy story and Mr. Mache's article went viral.
So naturally, the television networks and movie studios came calling, and a year and a half later, there's an HBO docuseries about the case coming out soon, as well as a Ben Affleck, Matt Damon movie in the works. But before the McDonald's Monopoly fraud case was a Daily Beast article, or a documentary, or a movie, or any of those things, it was a swindled bonus episode entitled The Promotion.
In fact, it was the very first bonus episode we ever published on Patreon, and the case is actually one of the inspirations for creating this podcast in the first place. That episode was originally researched, written, and published by yours truly in December 2017, and at the time there was very little information about the case publicly available, essentially just a few newspaper articles. But now, with all of the recent exposure, more details previously unreported have surfaced.
So what we decided to do is revisit that bonus episode and re-release it for everybody to hear. So here it is, the promotion. Re-written, re-recorded, re-mixed, re-mastered, re-dux. Oh, and if you like it, consider supporting the show at patreon.com slash swindled. There are more bonus episodes like this one waiting for you, and a lot more to come. And they're all commercial free. Join us at patreon.com slash swindled. Or you'll just have to wait for Ben Affleck to make a movie about it.
Suit yourself. Enjoy.
Wow!
So do not just go, go directly to McDonald's. Play Monopoly. About 30 years ago, fast food giant McDonald's joined forces with the toy company Parker Brothers to create one of the most successful marketing promotions of all time, the McDonald's Monopoly game. Since 1987, the promotion has been played worldwide in many different variations and has awarded over $1 million in prizes over the past decade alone.
It has become such a phenomenon that the game pieces are often sold and traded through Craigslist ads, eBay auctions, and online forums. Some of the more enthusiastic players have increased their odds of winning by committing armed robberies at the restaurants, like the board game, which was designed by Elizabeth Maggie in 1902 to illustrate the dangers of unchecked capitalism.
The object of the promotion is to collect sets of light-colored property, such as boardwalk and park place, or sets of specialty property, such as all four railroads. Once a set of properties is complete, the game pieces can be redeemed for prizes that range from cash, cars, vacations, and houses to french fries or desserts.
The game pieces come attached to the containers of certain McDonald's food and drink items, and upon purchase, the pieces are removed from the containers to reveal a single property from the classic board game or an instant winner, along with the associated prize. For McDonald's, the purpose of the promotion is to sell more hamburgers. And what better way to sell more hamburgers than to convince your customers that the next hamburger they buy could potentially make them a millionaire?
The more that the customers feel like they have an actual chance at winning the grand prize, the more hamburgers they will probably buy chasing it. For most consumers that play the game every single year, it seems like they are only one game piece away from a giant windfall of cash or a brand new sports car. And that's because they probably are. And so are millions of other people across the nation. But the sad reality is that their chances of finding that final piece are not good.
Reason being, and this may seem obvious, but not all of the game pieces are produced evenly. For instance, the probability of finding both the brown properties, Baltic Avenue and Mediterranean Avenue collectively, is 1 in a million. On the surface, those odds aren't bad, especially if the probability of selecting each piece were equal, such as 1 in 1000, but that's not the case. The probability of finding Baltic Avenue is very common, at 1 in 10 pieces.
However, the probability of finding Mediterranean is 1 in 100,000. The combined probability of finding both remains 1 in 1 million, as if each piece's probability were 1 in 1,000. But the drastic differences in each piece's probability make it so that the odds of collecting both isn't as easy as the 1 in 1 million odds make it seem. It also explains why seemingly everyone is missing the same exact piece.
And remember, those 1 in a million odds just pertain to the brown properties, which are the cheapest properties on the board. The odds skyrocket for the properties containing the best prizes, which renders the majority of game pieces basically worthless, since all of the best prizes hinge on finding one of the limitedly produced pieces. To compare, the odds of winning the Powerball lottery is reported to be 1 in 175 million.
The odds of winning a million dollars by finding Boardwalk and Park Place in the McDonald's Monopoly game are 1 in 600 million. That's right. You have a better chance of winning the lottery than you do winning the grand prize of the McDonald's Monopoly game. And it's also much cheaper to play, and it doesn't do as much damage to your waistline. Not that I'm endorsing playing the lottery. Those games have their own issues. See Season 1, Episode 1 of this very podcast.
And as lousy as those odds are, it gets worse. The odds of winning the McDonald's Monopoly game dwindle to zero when someone from the marketing company that produces the game steals all of the rare pieces and sells them to their friends and family. And from 1989 to 2001, that's exactly what was happening. Support for Swindled comes from Rocket Money.
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Have you ever played McDonald's Monopoly or the Monopoly game for McDonald's? Okay, have you ever won? No. Do you know anyone who's ever won? No, but you win like free fries and things. Okay, there's a reason you don't know anyone who's ever won. For years and years, the game was compromised. It was rigged.
Jerome Jacobson, also known as Uncle Jerry, was an ex-cop who worked as the head of security for Simon Marketing, Inc., the Los Angeles-based company that McDonald's contracted with to produce all of its promotional items, including the Monopoly game pieces. Jacobson joined the police department in Hollywood, Florida in the late 70s, but was forced to retire because of chronic health issues.
Afterwards, Jerry and his first wife moved to Atlanta, where he eventually started a new career in private security for the marketing company, a career that Jerry Jacobson approached very seriously. A former colleague of Jacobson's told the Daily Beast that he, quote, inspected workers' shoes to check they weren't stealing McDonald's game pieces, while a truck driver tasked with transporting the game pieces recalled, quote, I couldn't even go to the bathroom without someone going with me.
It was Uncle Jerry's job to oversee the production and distribution of the Monopoly game pieces. The process began at a plant in Georgia where game pieces were printed, separated by value, and placed into sealed envelopes. As a security measure, Jerry, accompanied by an independent auditor, would then hand deliver the sealed envelopes to the manufacturing plants where McDonald's food and cup containers were produced.
Jerry Jacobson's scheme began during the first few years of the game's introduction, around 1989. But it started slowly. On one trip to deliver the game pieces to the manufacturing plant, Jerry entered an airport bathroom so the female auditor couldn't follow. He locked himself in a stall and carefully opened the sealed envelope containing the most valuable pieces.
Jerry stuffed a piece worth $25,000 into his pocket, resealed the envelope with tamper-proof seals he had intercepted, and delivered the rest of the pieces to the factories. A few days later, Jerry's stepbrother, Marvin Baran, claimed the prize. In the following years, the scheme grew in size as Jerry Jacobson began using family and friends to recruit prospective buyers for the rare pieces in exchange for a kickback.
Jerry knew better than to sell the pieces to his immediate family members since it would be easily traced back to him. But it seemed like anyone loosely connected to someone close to Jerry could participate, as long as they were willing to give him a cut. By 1995, Uncle Jerry was stealing every game piece of value. The winners included psychics, butchers, strip club owners, drug dealers, and Mormons.
Even a self-proclaimed mobster named Jerry Colombo, that Jacobson had met randomly in the Atlanta airport, got in on the action. Colombo was given an instant winner game piece for Dodge Viper.
He even appeared in a McDonald's commercial for the promotion. People everywhere are winning big, playing the Monopoly game at McDonald's. Barbara Gray won a Sea-Doo jet boat. Mary Wallingsford won a $2,000 Citibank shopping spree. Kyle MacKinnon won a Sega Saturn with a Daytona USA game. Jerry Colombo won a Dodge Viper. In the following years, friends and associates of Uncle Jerry collected over $20 million worth of prizes from multiple McDonald's promotions.
It is alleged that for the biggest prizes, Jacobson would charge as much as $50,000 in cash, which was to be paid in advance. In order to obtain the cash, it was revealed that the prize winners would often mortgage their houses. In total, from the late 80s to the early 2000s, Uncle Jerry Jacobson is reported to have received over $1 million in kickbacks from selling the game pieces. He purchased a new home in Lawrenceville, Georgia, went on expensive cruises and acquired numerous classic cars.
inspired by his new Italian mobster friends. Jerry even started going by a new name, Geraldo Constantino. Life was good. Jerry and his crew were winning. But the universe has a funny way of evening the score. And it started with Jerry Colombo, the mafioso who won the free car with the stolen ticket. Colombo died a year later on a freeway when a speeding truck crashed into him.
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NBC News In Depth tonight. Fast food and fraud. The FBI today arrested eight members of a fraud ring accused of stealing the top prize tickets and rigging several years worth of cash giveaways at McDonald's, including the hugely popular Monopoly game. Prosecutors say it appears McDonald's customers never really had a chance to win the biggest prizes.
The scheme unraveled in 1996 when one of the participants approached law enforcement with details of the conspiracy. With the information obtained from the informant, the FBI launched Operation Final Answer, a reference to another rigged McDonald's promotion based on the popular TV game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Using wiretaps, 25 FBI agents tracked 20,000 phone numbers and recorded 235 cassette tapes of discussions about everything from devising cover stories and phony addresses to recruitment problems and tax issues. They were able to track the suspects as they met with recruiters and recruitees in the ironically named town of Fairplay, South Carolina.
As the investigation came to a close, the FBI was confident that they would be able to predict who would be calling to collect the next $1 million prize. And they were correct. For the 21 million Americans who eat each day at McDonald's, they're some of the most popular instant winner games. Monopoly and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? And says the FBI today, they were rigged. The FBI today arrested an official of Simon Marketing in Georgia that ran the promotional games for McDonald's.
At the center of the fraud ring, prosecutors say Jerome Jacobson assigned to place the winning big cash game pieces into circulation. Instead, the FBI says he stole them and gave them to three friends and business associates. They, in return, gave him a $50,000 kickback for each one and recruited friends and family who actually claimed the prizes. Total take of the ring, says the FBI, more than $13 million.
McDonald's says tonight it has fired the Georgia company that ran the contests, and now the FBI is investigating how many other instant winners weren't so instant after all. On August 21, 2001, eight people, including Uncle Jerry Jacobson, were arrested on charges of mail fraud and conspiracy to commit mail fraud. In the following months, another 44 people involved in the multi-state crime ring were indicted.
and not a single one was an employee of McDonald's. Many of the winners were from the same family or were closely related. All appeared connected in some fashion even though a variety of tricks were used to conceal their relationships and their locations. The trial took place on September 10th, 2001, which explains the limited media coverage.
47 out of the 52 people charged in the case pleaded guilty, including Jerry Colombo's 63-year-old father-in-law, William Fisher. William had collected $300,000 after redeeming a game piece that was given to him by his daughter. After he was sentenced to three years probation, Fisher told the court, "...I'm at the lowest point in my life right now. I've lost the respect of my friends and my family. The phone doesn't ring at the Fisher house anymore."
Uncle Jerry Jacobson, the ringleader, was one of the defendants who pleaded guilty. He expressed remorse for his actions and told the court he had embarrassed his family. The government seized everything he owned, and he was sentenced to 37 months in prison.
As part of his plea deal, Jerry was forced to pay $12.5 million in restitution, while the other defendants were forced to forfeit their prizes and money they had collected or had purchased with their winnings. However, one lucky winner was allowed to keep their prize. In 1995, the St. Jude's Children's Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee received a plain white envelope in the mail. There was no return address. The only identifiable feature was that it had been postmarked in Dallas, Texas.
The clerk who opened the mail initially thought it was an empty letter and almost tossed it out. When a small McDonald's Monopoly game piece fell out onto her desk, it was an instant winner for $1 million. Typically, prizes are non-transferable and must be claimed by the purchaser. But McDonald's decided to waive the rules in this case, and St. Jude's would begin receiving annual installments of $50,000 over the next 20 years.
The $1 million prize was the largest anonymous gift in St. Jude's history. Unfortunately, it came as the result of a crime. While being questioned by authorities, Uncle Jerry admitted that he had been unable to recruit a winner before the contest deadline. And rather than let the winning ticket go to waste, he decided to put it to good use by sending it to the hospital anonymously.
After the results of the investigation were known, St. Jude's offered to return the money to McDonald's, but the fast food giant refused. Millions of McDonald's customers legitimately won prizes over the years, from free food and drinks to cash and merchandise. Although the investigation and subsequent arrests regarding the Monopoly game were a public relations nightmare for McDonald's, the promotion continues to this day.
And as an apology to players who were playing against impossible odds for years, the company gave away $10 million in instant cash prizes. And even though it appeared that the conspiracy was the result of one rogue employee, McDonald's severed ties with the Simon Marketing Company that produced the game pieces. So did Philip Morris, the big tobacco company.
Together, McDonald's and Morris accounted for over 70% of Simon Marketing's sales, which were $768 million in the year 2000. As a result, shares of Simon Marketing plummeted by almost 80%, and more than 200 people lost their jobs. This fraud scheme denied McDonald's customers a fair and equal chance of winning.
We want those involved in this type of corruption to know that breaking the law is not a game. Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard. For more information about Swindled, you can visit swindledpodcast.com and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter at Swindled Podcast.
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