Since 1987, McDonald's has run an annual promotional game in the United States under a Monopoly licence: customers peel off stamps stuck on their packaging, hoping to land on one of the winning squares — up to one million dollars for the top prize. The management of the game, including the printing of the tickets, is entrusted to an outside contractor, Simon Marketing.
From 1989 to 2001, almost all of the game's major prizes — more than 24 million dollars in total according to the federal investigation — were not pocketed by players, but diverted by a network organised around a single man.
Jerome Jacobson, the man in charge of securing the tickets
Jerome Jacobson, a former Florida police officer, headed security for the game at Simon Marketing: he supervised the printing of the winning stamps and personally escorted them to the distribution points, precisely to prevent any fraud. From 1989 onwards, it was he himself who diverted the high-value tickets before they were put into circulation.
A network of accomplices, for twelve years
Jacobson never cashed them himself: he distributed them, in return for a commission of several tens of thousands of dollars per ticket, to a network of accomplices who presented themselves at the draws as ordinary winners. They included relatives, but also people linked to organised crime, club owners, a fortune teller, and a family that recruited fake winners. More than fifty people were ultimately convicted in this case.
The anonymous call that triggered the investigation
The scheme collapsed in 2000, after an anonymous caller contacted the FBI to report that the latest winner of the one-million-dollar top prize was not a genuine winner, and that the network was being run behind the scenes by a certain “Uncle Jerry”.
“Operation Final Answer”
The FBI opened an investigation named Operation Final Answer — a nod to the television game show Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, co-sponsor of that year's edition of the Monopoly game. Twenty-five agents monitored the activity of 20,000 telephone numbers and recorded 235 wiretap tapes, before a coordinated wave of arrests in several States in August 2001.
The epilogue
Jerome Jacobson pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to 37 months in prison and ordered to repay 12.5 million dollars. McDonald's was never implicated in this case: the brand was the victim of the scheme, and cooperated with the FBI — including, for the duration of the investigation, by broadcasting a fake television advertisement announcing a one-million-dollar prize, in order to trap the last members of the network still active.
In 2020 the story inspired a six-part documentary, McMillions, co-produced by HBO. It joins, among the best-documented anecdotes about the brand, Don Gorske's record or the false rumour of the Jamie Oliver lawsuit — except that here, the fraud was very real and duly tried.