Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - The $24,000,000 McDonald's Monopoly Scam

Episode Date: February 11, 2025

This is the story of Jerome Jacobson aka Uncle Jerry and the McDonald's Monopoly scam.

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They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and all birds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash special offer. So this guy, his name's Jerome, and Jerome is about to steal $24 million from McDonald's?

So Jerome, he used to be a cop, but now he's a director of security at a marketing firm. And one day, the marketing firm he works for comes up with a promotion for one of its biggest clients, McDonald's. And in this promotion, they combine McDonald's and Monopoly into a game, where customers win free French fries or free drinks, or the grand prize, $1 million. And this game blows up, like it is massively popular. And Jerome, as Director of Security, he's in charge of transporting those winning game pieces from the company to the factory. And this is a very secure process. The pieces are locked up in a case in envelopes with tamper sealed tape on them.

And they have an auditor shadowed Jerome around any time he has the case. And the auditor's always looking over his shoulder. Like when he travels with the case, the auditor has to sit next to him on the plane. McDonald's is hardcore. But then one day, Jerome figures out how to steal one of the winning game pieces worth $25,000. Now, Jerome, he can't cash this piece in himself because he works for McDonald's, it would look suspicious. So he gives it to his stepbrother to cash in to see if anyone at corporate notices the piece is missing. And surprise, surprise, no one does.

So his plan works flawlessly. So of course, Jerome's like, dope, I'm going to do it again. And he starts stealing more of these winning game pieces, and he starts selling them to people he knows. and he makes a little cash on the side doing this. And this scam goes on for several years. But then one day, something crazy happens. Jerome is chilling at home and a package is delivered. And he opens it up and he sees like a roll of tape.

The same tamper safe tape they used to seal up the envelopes with the winning game pieces. I guess the supplier had accidentally mailed the tape to Jerome's house instead of the McDonald's factory. So Jerome sees this and he immediately sees an opportunity to make even more money. So then boom, sometime later, He's at the airport and he's transporting the case with the winning pieces in it. And the auditor, she's there with him. And so Jerome tells her he needs to use the restroom. And then he takes the case in there with him.

And then he gets one of the envelopes. He breaks the seal. He pockets the winning game pieces and replaces them with losing game pieces. Then he seals the envelope back up with the tape he got. He then later sells those winning pieces to more people he knows. And they all cash in. So much so that after a while, Jerome starts telling those people to resell those pieces to people in other states. to make it all harder to track back to Jerome.

And with this strategy, Jerome starts stealing more and more pieces, and he distributes them out to more and more people in his network to sell. And at some point, he even brings on a couple of recruiters, and they help him get his winning tickets out to people across the country, and his network just keeps getting bigger and bigger. He even jacks some of the million dollar prize pieces. One of them, Jerome anonymously donates to St. Jude's Children's Hospital, because I guess he feels bad about all the stealing he's doing.

I don't know, but Jerome's scheme is working, and he and his friends are getting paid. Until. Eventually, McDonald's starts getting suspicious. Because a lot of these prize winners are strangely clustered around the Georgia, Florida area, when people should be winning all across the country. Plus, here's the biggest problem with this scam. With a system like this, the more people you involved, the more people know about the scheme.

And one day, one of those people, not sure who, they hit up the FBI. And they're like, I heard about a guy running a McDonald's monopoly scheme. And this helps the FBI connect the dots back to Jerome. So McDonald's execs, they find out about this and they want to shut the game down. But the FBI convinces them to run the promotion one last time. And this time, they wiretap Jerome and the other suspect's phones. Then when the suspects all go to cash in their stolen game pieces, McDonald's tells them there's been a delay in sending them.

the prize money. This delay forces all the suspects to wait on getting paid. And while they're waiting, they get paranoid and they panic. And they start contacting each other on the phone and they complain about how they never received their prize money from McDonald's and how the stolen game pieces aren't working. And since their phones are tapped, all of these conversations are used to incriminate them. So the FBI arrests Jerome, here's his mugshot, and they uncover his whole fraud scheme. And when all is said and done, over 50 people are convicted. scamming McDonald's out of $24 million worth of winning game pieces. Now Jerome, he actually ends up snitching on his employer, the marketing firm he worked for.

Because separately from all this, the firm was rigging the monopoly game too in a different way. And that's a whole other story. But because he snitched, Jerome only got 37 months in prison. And of course, they seized all his assets. So shout out to the hamburger, I guess. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task. unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

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