could track down the final evidence it needed. He found his big lead in 2001, when he mapped out the addresses of three winners - all of whom lived within miles of Jacobson’s South Carolina lake house.ĭent convinced McDonald’s to run one more Monopoly promotion, so the F.B.I. Gloria Brown, Murray found, was also having her annual checks delivered to a Jacksonville address.ĭent launched an investigation that would rope in 25 agents nationwide. One winner - Colombo’s father-in-law, who claimed $1 million from the contest - told Murray that he lived in New Hampshire, but property records in Jacksonville proved otherwise.
Special Agent Richard Dent, based in the F.B.I.’s Jacksonville office, contacted a McDonald’s spokeswoman, Amy Murray, who began trying to verify the winners. received an anonymous phone tip: Someone named “Uncle Jerry” was rigging the McDonald’s Monopoly promotion, stealing game pieces from the inside and selling them. In March 2000, according to The Daily Beast, the F.B.I. In airport bathrooms - en route to packaging plants - Jacobson would remove the envelope’s original seal, swap out winning pieces for regular ones and resecure the envelope with one of the new seals he was sent. A supplier sent him a package by mistake, filled with the metallic tamper-proof seals - the ones used to secure the envelopes filled with game pieces that Jacobson was charged with delivering. Jacobson came across the materials he needed by accident, according to The Daily Beast article. ‘The Underground Railroad’: Barry Jenkins’s transfixing adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulistic yet grittily real.‘Succession’: In the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires, being rich is nothing like it used to be.
Here are some of the highlights selected by The Times’s TV critics:
What started as just stealing one small fry piece, turned into a network of scamming with accomplices that included the mob, psychics, ex-cons, drug dealers, strip club owners, housewives, and a Mormon family, all guilty for falsely claiming more than $24 million in cash and prizes.ĭigressions include Titanic, The Wolf of Wall Street, Black mothers asking about your "McDonald's money," and why this grift could've only been executed by a white man.Įach episode Cass and Taylor rate the scam! Here's this week's results.įollow today's sponsored brand, By Santos on Instagram and don't forget to visit to get a discount using the code featured in this episode!įollow today's sponsored brand, By Santos on Instagram and don't forget to visit By-Santos.Television this year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. In deep dive published by The Daily Beast (most recently optioned to be the blueprint for an upcoming film chronicling the grift a la Hustlers) Uncle Jerry had insider access to the pieces while working as director of security for Simon Marketing, the company in charge of producing the game pieces.
The game promised lavish vacation, cars, and the chance to win $1 million, but no one ever actually won anything more than a double serving of fries, and that's because the game was rigged for 12 years by a former cop named Jerome "Uncle Jerry" Jacobson. It all began in 1987 with a little nationwide Monopoly game McDonald's cooked up, which saw customers feverishly collecting game pieces attached to drink cups, french fry packets, magazine ads and.selling on Bay. You have to decide three things: do you do it, yes or no?ĭo you take your money upfront in a lump sum or in small payments of $50,000/yr for 20 years? Finally, do you pay the $50,000 finders fee she’s demanding to her and all of the “someones” involved upfront or ask that you have a year to pay them back?ĭon’t Hate the Player, Hate the Game - How Jerome "Uncle Jerry" Jacobson McScammed $24 Million from McDonald's Monopoly So imagine that your homegirl presents you the opportunity to “win” a contest for a million dollars. Question of the scam: We all have a friend who seems to know someone who knows someone.