2023-08-14 00:21:58
Monday, August 14, 2023, 00:21
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This summer, McDonald’s has once again launched a new version of its Monopoly game in its establishments in Spain. It is a variation of the collaboration between the restaurant chain and the Hasbro toy company, which, among many joys, also caused the restaurant chain one of its greatest disappointments; being the victim of a $24 million fraud.
In 1985, the firm asked the creators of its successful Happy Meal to create a new impact promotional campaign. The company, Simon Marketing, then came up with a brilliant idea: uniting the brand with the popular Monopoly, an initiative that was well received both by McDonald’s itself and by the Parker Brothers toy company, later acquired by Hasbro. As in the board game, customers would have to add properties to get prizes that ranged from a free menu to one million euros, including video games, trips, cars… To ‘purchase’ them, all you had to do was look closely at the hamburger wrappers. and adding coupons until completing a series of colors in the hope that one of them would hide one of the jackpots.
Given that by law it cannot manage its own promotions, McDonald’s entrusts this task to Simon Marketing, who invents a whole security protocol to control the printing and distribution of the winning tickets. The promotion is so successful that sales increase by 40%, which is why it is exported to several countries and has been active since its launch, in 1987, until 2001. Until August 3, 2001, specifically. That day, Michael Hoover waits at his home in Westerly, Rhode Island, for McDonald’s representatives who, with a television crew and a huge cardboard check, come to present him with one of the million-euro prizes. Before the cameras, he tells how excited he was to win, as many other award winners have done before. His luck would serve to encourage people to continue dreaming of suddenly becoming a millionaire just by going to a fast food chain restaurant.
He has no idea, though they’ll tell him right away, that the film crew is actually made up of FBI agents who, with the complicity of McDonald’s, are collecting testimonials from winners to expose a massive fraud. There is a mafia network distributing, in exchange for a succulent percentage, the winning tickets and it has already defrauded the company of 24 million dollars without it having the slightest suspicion.
Jerome Jacobson, Simon Marketing’s head of security, had seen years ago how to bypass controls to steal tickets. Since he could not collect them, he began to offer them to family and friends in exchange for a commission, sometimes up to 50,000 euros. But he began to have problems managing the business and chose to partner with Gennaro Colombo, a member of a storied New York mafia family. To convince him of his power, he gave him the ticket that made him the winner of a Chrysler Dodge Viper.
With the entry of the mafioso, the fraud began to adopt the formula of a pyramid scheme in which new blood was always needed, for which reason it acquired dimensions that were difficult to control and hide. Thus, fourteen years after the start of the game, in 2001 an anonymous call alerted the authorities of the “proximity” of some of the lucky ones and the FBI began to pull the thread. He asked McDonald’s for the details of the winners and to continue with the promotion while listening and filming the false advertisements in which he hoped that the testimonies of those involved would contradict each other. In the end, they were able to arrest Jacobson along with eight collaborators (Colombo died in a traffic accident in 1998) and accuse more than 50 ‘winners’ of fraud, while McDonald’s tried to get rid of the scandal by distributing another 25 million in prizes and Simon Marketing was going to bankruptcy.
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#scammer #stole #million #McDonalds #Monopoly