McDonald’s Monopoly is one of the simplest promotions in fast food. Buy food, peel off game pieces modeled on the Monopoly board, and collect sets to win anything from free fries to $1 million. The game first ran in the United States in 1987 and became a yearly event. For more than a decade, though, almost nobody could win the biggest prizes, because they had already been stolen.
How the game worked
McDonald’s did not run the game itself. It hired a marketing company, Simon Marketing (later part of Simon Worldwide), to handle the printing and distribution of game pieces and the awarding of major prizes. The rarest pieces, such as Boardwalk, which completed the $1 million Park Place and Boardwalk set, were produced in tiny numbers and tightly controlled.
“Uncle Jerry”
Jerry Jacobson was a former police officer who became director of security at the marketing agency. His job was to protect the high-value pieces: he took them from the printer, put them into envelopes and sealed them with tamper-proof stickers before they were seeded into packaging.
Instead, he took them himself. It started after a supplier mistakenly gave him a sheet of the anti-tamper seals used for transferring winning pieces. Jacobson first offered pieces to friends and family, then built a network of recruiters and fake winners, including, eventually, a contact linked to the Colombo crime family whom he had met by chance at the Atlanta airport. A winning piece would pass to a recruiter, who found someone to claim the prize, and the money was split.
According to reporting based on court documents, his network won nearly every top prize for about 12 years; Wikipedia’s account says his associates won almost all the top prizes between 1995 and 2000. Jacobson was careful: when his own local butcher asked for a piece, he refused because they were neighbors and it would look suspicious.
He later claimed he started after seeing company executives rerun draws to steer big prizes to the U.S. rather than Canada.
The collapse
The scheme eventually unraveled. In 2001 the U.S. promotion was halted, and more than 50 people were convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy in connection with a scheme that had defrauded McDonald’s out of more than $24 million. The trial began on September 10, 2001, and was almost immediately overshadowed in the news by the September 11 attacks the next day.
Why it’s “mixed”
As marketing, McDonald’s Monopoly is a success. It has run for decades in many countries and keeps being revived because it drives repeat visits. The format has kept evolving: the 2001 edition let winners choose how to take their prize, and in 2016 the U.S. version became “Money Monopoly,” with all-cash prizes.
It has had critics beyond the fraud, too. In the U.K. in 2018, 25 million instant food prizes were offered but only 8 million were claimed, and in 2019 politician Tom Watson called the promotion a “danger to public health” for encouraging repeat fast-food purchases.
The story that outlived the scandal
The fraud became a pop-culture story in its own right. In 2018 Ben Affleck and Matt Damon were attached to a film about it, and in 2020 HBO premiered McMillions, a documentary series about the case.
Lessons
- Outsourcing a promotion doesn’t outsource the risk. McDonald’s brand took the hit for a failure at its contractor.
- Controls need controls. The person trusted to guard the prizes was the one stealing them, with no independent check.
- A good mechanic survives a scandal. Because customers liked the game, McDonald’s could rebuild it rather than abandon it.