The dark true story of how fast food crime gang swindled millions playing McDonald’s Monopoly & got it banned in US

MOST of us Brits can’t wait for McDonald’s Monopoly to come back every year – but it’s a different story across the pond.

As the game comes to an end this week in the UK, we look back on the biggest McDonald’s scam ever committed which left one man three million pounds richer – and in prison.

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We love playing McDonald’s Monopoly in the UK but it isn’t available in the US anymore[/caption]

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One man in charge of making sure prizes won fairly stole $23 million from the fast food chain[/caption]

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Jerome Jacobson was jailed for over two years[/caption]

Burger wars

Legendary TV writer and podcast host Karen Kilgariff revealed all on the scandal of Uncle Jerry and how he swindled over £20 million from the game on the podcast, My Favourite Murder.

She says it all started with what was called the ‘Burger Wars’ in the 1980s – where fast-food chains like Burger King, McDonald’s and Wendy’s were competing for customers by berating each other in TV adverts.

“Ultimately McDonald’s did win the burger wars because other companies who were slightly smaller basically trying to attack the giant were spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising and marketing, and McDonald’s s*** went up by 40%,” she claimed.

The free advertisement from other companies meant customers headed right to their stores to see who really had the better burger – and the bosses decided they needed a game plan to keep them coming back.

Working with Simon Marketing, they invented the Happy Meal in 1979, and then Simons came up with a new strategy – McDonald’s Monopoly in 1987.

We all know the premise of the game in the UK – buy medium or large meals and collect stickers with Monopoly board pieces.

Some stickers offer ready-to-go prizes such as chips or a burger, but if you collect all of the same coloured streets you can win cars and thousands in cash – an incentive that keeps people coming back to play and buy more meals.

Back in the day, prizes went up to £753,810.00 ($1 million) and you could go in and ask for the stickers for free as it was illegal to turn customers away as the game would be considered gambling.

Of course, the big prize stickers are the hardest to find, so people keep coming back and sales increase by 40%.

Fast forward to 2001, where Florida FBI agent Doug Matthews and his partner get an anonymous tip off that the game is fixed as three of the $1 million jackpot prizes have been won by the same family – the only reason they hadn’t been caught was because they had different last names.

Keep it in the family

Jerome P. Jacobson, also known as Uncle Jerry, and a former cop, was the mastermind behind the plan as the FBI learned every big prize winner had a familial connection with him – the odds of which were impossible without dirty work going into it.

Rob Holmes, head of security at Mcdonald’s is called to meet the FBI as they explain the situation and is left stunned and horrified as the company was preparing the next Monopoly game.

Instead of calling it off they devise a plan to catch the scam artist in the act with the help of security at McDonald’s.

The next big winner of the game is a man named Micheal Hoover, Uncle Jerry’s local butcher, the police decide to go undercover to film a ‘commercial’ for McDonald’s and follow the winner around and how he won.

He revealed he got the ticket in a magazine, as some of the McDonald’s stickers were also available in them to win and he planned to spend his earnings on buying a boat.

Little did Hoover know that the police put a wiretap on him and were able to hear his conversation discussing Uncle Jerry – the same name in the anonymous tip off.

Even more damning for Hoover, the FBI could hear him bragging about how the ‘filming crew’ believed everything he said about finding the winning ticket – but this was just the tip of the iceberg.

They find a recurring phone number in every winner’s phone records and find it matches with Jerome P. Jacobson – the head of security at Simon Marketing – the company putting together the Monopoly game for McDonald’s.

Jerome’s role entailed watching the printing of the winning pieces and making sure they were hidden within the McDonald’s packaging.

Jacobson made sure all the winning prizes were won by his friends and relatives whom he would charge a percentage of their winnings in advance.

Eventually, his scheme grew with the inclusion of middle men who would sell the winning pieces.

How he did it

Jerome and other auditors ensuring the safety of the winning pieces were sometimes ordered to drop off the winning tickets directly to the drink cup and french fry holders factories in sealed suitcases.

But Jerome soon figured out that he could rig the game to his advantage after accidentally being sent a package of seals directly – meaning he could open the stickers up to see winning tickets and then reseal them so he could switch them out.

While travelling with auditors to hand out the winning tickets he would go to the bathroom stalls and take them out to replace them with regular non-winning stickers.

As winning the tickets himself would be too obvious – he and his family found people willing to pay thousands to secure the winning tickets for themselves.

Jerome gave one game piece worth $200,000 to his butcher (Hoover) in exchange for $45,000 in cash. In 1998, Jacobson would pull his nephew into the scheme with the same offer (a $200,000 game piece for $45,000 upfront).

He even anonymously mailed a $1 million game piece to the donations clerk at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee.

Caught in the act

Once the police had been tipped off it was game over for Jerome who was constantly being watched along with recent suspected winners.

But the police had a hard time nailing down Jerome as the ring-leader so they instead asked McDonald’s to put a pause on the most recent winning tickets being paid out.

This led to many of them frantically calling up Jerome, whose phone had been wiretapped by police and gave them the evidence they needed to get him and several accomplices arrested in August 2001.

In the end more than 50 people were arrested for mail fraud and Jerome was sentenced to 37 months in prison and ordered to pay back $12 million.

It’s thought that he stole $24 million worth of winning stickers from McDonald’s and made himself $3 million over the 12 years of his scheme.

Now the Monopoly game is no longer played in the US but can still be found in Canada, Ireland and the UK.

“McDonald’s is committed to giving our customers a chance to win every dollar that has been stolen by this criminal ring,” McDonald’s then-CEO, Jack Greenberg, said in a statement at the time.