Reuters reports that the FBI has broken up a ring of eight criminals led by Jerome Jacobson, a man who worked for Simon Marketing, a company who distributed game pieces for promotions for McDonald’s such as Monopoly and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. It seems Jacobson embezzled winning pieces and distributed them to friends and co-workers, who would give other people the winning pieces in agreement to give them back some of the money they “won.” This has been going on since 1995. The FBI is looking for more people who may have been involved in what the FBI is calling “Operation Final Answer.”
Strange, I would have thought it was Lucy who would have been on the business end of the rigging.
(There’s a good plot for an episode of I Love Lucy 2001 right there: Lucy is upset that she didn’t win the McDonald’s promotion, as Tyklife put it, so she and Ethel decide to create their own promotion at the Club Babalu by dressing up as businessmen and getting Ricky to agree with it. The whole thing backfires when Lucy and Ethel realize they have no actual money to pay to the “winners.”)
I was told years ago that the best winning game pieces are placed in the lots of gamepieces sent to franchises with poor sales. The idea being, of course, that a Big Win in the neighborhood would bring people in by the droves. So while not exactly fixed, it ain’t exactly random, either.
see, now this one REALLY pisses me off…I worked at McD’s for half a damn year, and stole probably thousands of those things out of pure boredom while on breaks, and now I know why I never won a damn thing…and all this time I thought it was bad karma…hrmph
Authorities said that no McDonald’s Corp. employees were involved and that McDonald’s assisted the investigation. At the FBI’s request, McDonald’s ran a Monopoly game in July that helped investigators nab a fraudulent $1 million winner.
–So THAT’S what happened to the Monopoly game! They were able to kill it so fast. And they’re gonna bring a new game in by August 30.
Gang, you don’t kill a game this big this fast. You don’t introduce a new game this fast without mucho planning in the meetings.
Personally, I’m tired of this thing already. We have faxes coming in from the corporate office, phone calls, voicemails…everyone wants to make sure we know how the put the right spin on this scandal. Any inquiries have to be directed to the manager…like I want to deal with this crap…
Ill give McD’s credit for this much though, they found a way to make the most of this. Labor day weekened, when we already make a killing in sales, they’ll double the business from this promotion. They’ll easily win back the $10 million they lost…
who was the assistant manager in a mcds for 5 years was that they only sent certain pieces to certain regions so that no matter what you did unless you traved to each region you couldnt get all the pieces ie the thing were like 5 or 6 pieces that were impossible to find but its a diffrent 5 or 6 pieces in each region
althouhg with the internet im suprised you havent seen a trading scheme happen
but this brings up something similiar out here in la ca
these kids came up wiht a program that would block calls and thye would call in the various raido stations and win what ever prize they were giving out and what was so unusual about it is they could edit the calls like if say the contest wanted caller 19 they could disconnect say callers 19 through 30 and then hed call up and win
this went on for liek 4 years and as they got older the prizes got bigger until they started winning money
thats how they got caught is one day they won 30,000 on one radio station a d.j. from another radio station that they had just wone money from heard it s thought the caller sounded familiar found out over the years all theyve won and the alerted the authorites
it was infered that they hit almosty all the major la stations
the last i heard was they were geting 5 years in jail huge fines ect and they were looking into federal charges for fraud comupert crimes ect
