‘McMillions’: ex-cop orchestrated $24M McDonald’s Monopoly scam | Hacker News Reader

‘McMillions’: ex-cop orchestrated $24M McDonald’s Monopoly scam

nypost.com

96 pointshhs56 comments

I read this story not too long ago. It's a pretty amazing story, honestly like something from a movie. Though, it did make me think back to being a kid at that time being hopeful we might win. Get that boardwalk and park place. Now I know it was never possible to win in Canada at that time it does kind of bring this feeling of being cheated. My dad always said conspiratorially that the game was a scam and you could never win. It's funny to think he was right, though not for the reasons he thought.

It's a great story so reposts aren't that frustrating, but the Daily Beast reporting in 2018 is better researched and wildly entertaining: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-an-ex-cop-rigged-mcdonalds...

I don't believe Jacobson's connection to Columbo was a complete random happening at an airport.

More realistically, at least one of Jacobson's friends or family couldn't keep their mouth shut that Jacbson worked for the promotion. An associate of theirs was connected to Columbo and decided to extort Jacobson.

"Taking the stand in a Jacksonville, Fla., courthouse, he admitted: “All I can tell you is I made the biggest mistake of my life.”

More like "the biggest protracted series of mistakes". Or perhaps "the most mistakey criminal enterprise I have ever devoted 12 years of my life to".

McDo: Here we're putting you in charge of placing the $1Million prize pieces.

Employee: Okey-dokes.

McDo: [Thinks] Hey that employee is getting really rich, must be completely unrelated. Lets not bother to check up on them.

???

Was someone higher up in on the deal?

I'm surprised at the lack of checks and balances in place. That one person had unchecked control of the game.

Seriously, it seems like he was like the only person they needed to keep an eye on.

Along these lines... I once saw a movie in which, during a small town election, a character commented “You know who decides elections? The ballot counter.”

Contested elections have ballots counted in the presence of witnesses from each side.

All vote counting is made with the presence of people from multiple parties. Everywhere I've voted in, at least.

He wasn't a McDonalds employee at all.

> Jacobson was an ex-cop-turned-security guard who worked for Los Angeles-based Simon Marketing, which oversaw the contest behind the scenes.

"Oh, I work for other clients too" would've been a perfectly reasonable explanation for getting wealthy.

Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald%27s_Monopoly#Fraud

The reason why this incident isn't more widely known is that the trial commenced on September 10, 2001. Needless to say, coverage of it was quickly eclipsed by more serious events.

I wonder what other happenings in the U.S. were eclipsed by 9/11.

Chandra Levy's murder was front page news until the attacks

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Levy

Also a good podcast episode about the case and investigation

https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/murdered-chandra-levy/

No wonder I never heard that they solved it:

>Following a series of investigative reports by The Washington Post in 2008, the MPD followed up and finally obtained a warrant, on March 3, 2009, to arrest Ingmar Guandique, the illegal immigrant from El Salvador identified and dismissed by the MPDC eight years earlier.

It's still unsolved. The main witness on Guandique's trial was found to be very unreliable, so the case was dismissed.

Sounds like a bad hombre.

I remember hearing a joke around that time - "Who is the happiest man in America right now? - Gary Condit." Condit was being tossed and gored in the media for his supposed role in the disappearance of the intern with whom he had an affair. It was all forgotten pretty quickly that September. Apparently he had nothing to do with the intern's disappearance and murder, but it took years for that to be established.

On September 10, 2001, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld revealed that the Pentagon had lost $2.3 trillion from its budget. That figure has now grown to $6.5 trillion and counting.

https://www.metabunk.org/threads/debunked-rumsfeld-says-2-3-...

Thank you. That's a great site!

I just read it for the first time and was surprised to learn that he was announcing massive cuts to military spending, with base closures, consolidating departments between branches, eliminating acquisition teams, and outsourcing things like janitorial work. That, and better tracking of where the money is going. It was actually a refreshing speech and the exact opposite of the warmonger Rumsfeld would come to be known as.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100301161721/http://www.defens...

"There's a myth, sort of a legend, that money enters this building and disappears, like a bright light into a black hole, never to be seen again. In truth, there is a real person at the other end of every dollar, a real person who's in charge of every domain, and that means that there will be real consequences from, and real resistance to, fundamental change."

Donnie Darko’s release in October 2001 was very quiet after they pulled all advertising because a plane crash plays a prominent role in the plot.

The ending of the MGS2 video game (released in November of 2001) was butchered, since it involved a massive submarine crashing into New York City and Konami feared the game could be seen as a criticism of America. In the cutscenes that survived the butchering, you can see vestigial remnants of the original; most notably flagpoles without American flags on them. The ending of the game has the "villain" explain his desire to free America from the AI that personified of the military industrial complex. When he died, an American flag was meant to symbolically fall on his body.

Is that a regional change or a global change? Did the Japanese release retain the original ending?

Unfortunately it was a global change. MGS2 released in the US first, Japan a few weeks later. I'm not sure if that played a roll in any way.

Supposedly Propeller Arena on the Dreamcast was cancelled over the 9/11 attacks, though I suspect the game was already struggling or being killed for other reasons. There's a leak of the fairly-complete game and it's a hell of a lot of fun. My friends and I have burned a few evenings over the years on it. One of a handful of multiplayer games that we've loved and have no newer replacements for[1] so we have to bust out older consoles or emulation to play them.

[1] some others: Bushido Blade 2 (Playstation), Hunter Hunted (PC), Return Fire (Playstation), Blur (Playstation 3), kind of Perfect Dark (N64) which in many ways remains unmatched though of course there are many modern shooters; and then there are other games that do have modern sequels but we much prefer the older ones and they're rapidly getting harder to play because they're from early-ish 3D consoles and don't get re-releases so they won't compete with their own sequels (Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, for instance)

Another movie: Big Trouble, based on the novel of the same name by Dave Barry, with a big ensemble cast starring Tim Allen, Stanley Tucci, among others, was delayed getting to theaters, its marketing budget slashed, and its run in theaters shortened because of a prominent subplot about sneaking a bomb through airport security.

Infamously, here in the UK someone employed by the government had a similar thought and issued a memo that day saying that it was "a good day to bury bad news". Unfortunately for her, the memo was leaked.

The company I left graduate to cofound based on my invention was scheduled to launch that day with what would have been a major media event we'd planned for months.

Here's a brief history for anyone interested: http://joshuaspodek.com/videos-invention-company-founded.

While we didn't face consequences on the scale of people in the towers, the Pentagon, who fought overseas, and first responders, it devastated us.

On the morning of September 11, I stepped onto the stage at a trade show to launch my new product. Over the course of the presentation, a buzz developed, and people started standing up and leaving. By the end of my speech, the trade show had been cancelled and everyone was going home. Needless to say, the product was not successful.

Can we ask what it was? I'm curious to know if it would have gained traction if it had been launched a year later.

The Alt-rock band They Might Be Giants had a long awaited album "Mink Car" released on the unfortunate date of September 11, 2001.

Same with Bob Dylan’s Love and Theft.

It was also the release date of Slayer's ominously-titled "God Hates Us All".

https://www.metal-archives.com/albums/Slayer/God_Hates_Us_Al...

I remember hearing a lot about it during the leadup to the trial, even as a middle-schooler at the time. Because of how popular the Monopoly promotion was at the time, it left a big impact.

Didn't Gary Condit get accused of murdering his wife too or was the prime suspect?

I distinctly remember the nickname, "Con-did-it".

It's interesting how quickly people are tempted by money. I worked for a store that decided that they needed to reduce staff so they got rid of the supervisors that supervised the cashiers when they cashed out. They figured the cashiers had been there for so many years so they were trustworthy. Almost immediately the cashiers started to cheat by skimming a bit of cash and within a few months, most of them were replaced because they had been caught cheating in some way.

The temptation is too great for many people. Checks and balances always need to be put in place no matter how trustworthy the person is.

This case is a prime example of that.

They had trained those cashiers for years that the only reason they aren't skimming is because they are being watched.

Second that opinion, to me it sounds like they where never put in a trust situation where they'd really be in charge of a clean and honest cashout, and lashed back on the system when their "babysitters" where taken away.

> Almost immediately the cashiers started to cheat by skimming a bit of cash and within a few months, most of them were replaced because they had been caught cheating in some way.

Who caught them and how if they stopped counting the drawers?

A security camera on the register seems like the easiest way. If the cashier’s count doesn’t match the sum of customer transaction then watch the footage until you see them pocket the money.

Thus proving you don't need the manager oversight ?

Monitoring with cameras seems like an advance in technology that lowers the need for managers in the room. But it’s still a check as advocated earlier in the thread.

At larger companies they absolutely do this. And the digital video is stored with an overlay of what is ringing up with it's price as the cashier scans it. So it is easy to see if they are not scanning items for a partner or manually entering the wrong barcode.

It turned out that upper management, the managers above the managers that got rid of the supervisors, had gotten bad reports about what was happening in the store so they sent in a private investigator that posed as a new employee and no one was told he was an investigator. He was there a few months and caught the cashiers, and a guy selling coke. It was just a coincidence that he got the cashiers. They were aiming for the drug problem.

Just before all this was revealed I got a job at a different part of the company and was told what had happened so I never found out what ended up happening. I just know a lot of people were replaced.

It certainly doesn't help that a cashier doesn't make much in the first place.

Some previous articles:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17638677

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10643160

Were there bad publicity for Mc Donald after that in the US ?

After all, they made 40% raise in sales for a prize that was not possible.

As I recall they ran a new promotion after this all came out with even bigger prizes (and more of them) as an apology.

So he sold $1 Million tickets to the mob for $50K and the mobster got half of the prize from people. And those people got (stuck with paying taxes on the hole $1 Million.)

He got too little but then it was just a "day's work" and after a while you cannot launder them yourself.

If the prize "winners" came ahead with a dollar more than taxes they came out ahead.

He was smart, he took a decent amount of money but didn't risk his banker questioning where millions of dollars in his bank account came from.

Not if they spent the money before paying the taxes. You know how it goes when you get a bunch of money all of the sudden

Hell, you'll be relatively lucky if taxes are all that gets you: https://abcnews.go.com/US/lottery-jackpot-winners-lost-big/s...

As pleasurable as it is to imagine myself winning huge sums of cash it's also almost a sort of fire drill for in case it ever actually happens.

> If the prize "winners" came ahead with a dollar more than taxes they came out ahead.

Only if you don't count the risk of getting caught (and the lifelong stress that risk may induce even if you don't).

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