We highly recommend you go read the whole thing because it’s fantastic. Now this whole story was documented in extreme detail by Jeff Maysh for the Daily Beast in a 2018 article. Jacobson oversaw the production of all the monopoly game pieces and personally delivered all of the high value tickets to factories where they would be put on cups, bags, magazine adverts and more. That man was Jerome “Jerry” Jacobson, a former cop who went into private security and eventually became head of security for Simon and Dittler Brothers. When they were ready for transport the pieces were placed in an envelope with a tamper-proof sticker and the envelope was entrusted to one single employee. The game pieces were also intentionally made with imperfections and watermarks that could only be seen under a black light. The high value pieces were kept in a vault only accessible by two people entering an individual code at the same time. Together with Simon, Dittler created a complex and highly secure set of safeguards to keep the winning game pieces from getting burgled. So with that in mind, they hired Dittler Brothers Printing, a secure printing firm who were already printing U.S. The McDonald’s Monopoly was the fast food giant’s best marketing campaign since they introduced the Happy Meal and after the contest began in 1987, it quickly became clear that it was…well…a winner.īut as with all things involving free money, McDonald’s realised that the game would be the target of thieves and fraudsters.

The monopoly game was developed for McDonald’s by Simon Marketing, the geniuses who first put toys inside Happy Meals. Winners get to either take a heavily taxed $1 million lump sum or $50,000 every year for the next 20 years. You could win the grand prize by either matching the Park Place and the unbelievably rare Boardwalk game pieces or by getting an “Instant Win” game piece. So let’s touch on those odds of winning the $1 million prize: they’re 1 in 250 million. Today we’re exploring the sensational story of how one man and a merry band of mobsters, psychics, strip-club owners, Mormons, and drug traffickers managed to win nearly all of the McDonald’s top prizes for over a decade, and the undercover FBI operation that uncovered the whole damn thing. But for 12 years there was a McDonalds Monopoly Scandal (a McScam, if you will) going on behind the scenes where a complex web of insiders worked behind the scenes to rig the McDonald’s Monopoly, and steal over $24 million. The odds of winning big prizes like Jamaican vacations, boats, new cars and even the ever elusive $1 million are very very low.

All you’ve probably ever won is a free McFlurry. You tear the little game piece off your drink or carton of french fries and hope you’re a winner. If you’ve been to a McDonald’s since 1987, you’ve probably seen or played their McDonald’s Monopoly game.

Mcdonald’s monopoly rigged