A story about a former cop rigging the McDonald's Monopoly game in a $24 million scheme that lasted 12 years might have been one of the most talked-about scandals of all time — if it wasn't for 9/11.
The Daily Beast's in-depth report focuses on the long-running scam started by Jerry Jacobson, a former police officer who later worked for Simon Marketing, which produced the McDonald's promotional game pieces when the game started in the 1980s.
Jacobson, who spent three years in prison in connection with the fraud, reportedly stole winning Monopoly pieces he was hired to protect and sold them off, first to family members and friends, and later to a random assortment of people, all for kickbacks on the winnings.
Jacobson was also ordered to pay back $12.5 million in restitution, as more than 50 other people were also convicted of mail fraud and conspiracy in connection with the scam, according to The Daily Beast.
It was the kind of scandal that would make international headlines, but the trial took place the day before the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C., in 2001, essentially burying the story.
Jacobson told authorities he felt his bosses at Simon were not an innocent party to the scam, claiming that in 1995 when a random computerized draw selected a factory in Canada to receive the winning pieces, Simon Marketing executives re-ran the program until it selected a factory in the United States, The Daily Beast reported.
"I knew what we were doing in Canada was wrong," Jacobson told authorities, according to the report. "Sooner or later somebody was going to be asking questions about why there were no winners in Canada."
That year, Jacobson said he anonymously sent the winning Monopoly piece to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee. Indeed, Tammie Murphy found the piece in the hospital mail, a $1 million winner, but the "generous donor" of the piece was never identified.
Other winners handpicked by Jacobson and his associates included strip club owners, an alleged mobster, drug traffickers, convicts, and other people carefully recruited by his team who they assumed would play along with the scam, the website stated. The rest of America never had a chance.
Jacobson, whose comments come from court records, according to The Daily Beast, said he gave his first stolen winning Monopoly piece to his brother in 1989 "to see if I could do it," and he cashed in on a $25,000 payday.
But it all started to unravel in March 2000 when the FBI, through an anonymous tip, started to make the connection between the winners and set up a sting within one of the Monopoly promotions that year to capture Jacobson and his crew.
"I'm not one of those people who are mad at [the FBI]," said Andrew Glomb, a gambler who served time as part of Jacobson's crew, according to The Daily Beast. "It was a game, and I lost. I hate to say it but I'd probably do it again for the same reason. Every time I talk to Jacobson, I always tease him, I say, 'You got any tickets?'"
Business Insider reported in 2016 that, "over the past decade, according to a McDonald's spokesperson, $1 billion of cash and prizes have been available to win."
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