The Man Who Stole $24 Million From McDonald’s

inside a stuffy field office of the FBI in Jacksonville it's a notoriously sleepy Outpost of the bureau until today a mysterious informant calls up the office to let them know that the famous beloved McDonald's Monopoly game is riged a ring of criminals have been secretly pulling the strings for over a decade more than $24 million have been stolen the FBI kicks off a Manhunt with 25 agents on the case 20,000 phone numbers will be surveilled it will ultimately result in a massive undercover sting operation the agents will discover that behind this scheme is a vast

network of mafiosos Psychics strip club Owners and Mormons but one Mastermind sits at the center of it all he holds the keys to the treasure and rakes in most of the profits he's known by most as Uncle Jerry how did he do it [Music] I want it's the Monopoly game only at McDonald's with over 50 million priz is it super sized excitement starting in 1987 McDonald's launched the Monopoly promotion and started putting little game pieces from Monopoly onto their packaging this is Jeff M he's a crime journalist who broke the story in 2018 17 years

after the convictions his article went viral and set off a holiday bidding war for the rights to his story he ultimately sold them for $1 million and I actually I have one here I don't collect many things from my stories but I do have one of the original uh winning game cups here uh it says pull to play and on the side you can just see it says uh to collect and win just peel off the game stamp and apply to your game board and when you've applied enough pieces to your game board and you've

won a prize you mail it off to McDonald's uh and they send you your Sega Game Gear or your Dodge Viper McDonald's usually runs the game twice PR year the cash prizes are up to $1 million in an instant win the chance at winning that prize is 1 in 250 million the game brings McDonald's fat profits whenever the game is running business increases by up to 40% more than usual 1 in 250 million is an extremely long shot they far more likely to get struck by lightning twice but the color on the phone with the

agents in Jacksonville that day said that three of the recent big ticket winners were in fact related despite having different names the odds for three legitimate winners to all be related are inconceivably low the caller also claimed that one man who they only knew by Uncle Jerry was The Mastermind behind the scheme the FBI doesn't know this yet but his full name is Jerome Jacobson in a case like this the FBI might have to surveil suspects to collect evidence but what if someone collects all this information about you and they don't have a legitimate reason

today the internet is full of threats some some of them involve our most sensitive information in fact there is a huge Shadow industry surrounding our data so-called data broker snatch your browsing history your contact information and your online transactions this data is often bundled into Shadow profiles that are then sold you may receive a robo call or tailored email based on your Shadow profile in the worst case scenario someone may try to steal your identity incog helps you to remove your data from the numerous lists of data Brokers you just create your account and give

incog the right to act on your behalf incog then contacts the data Brokers and requests the removal of your sens to information you can always see the current status in the dashboard there is a satisfying progress report from how many data Brokers lists you've been removed from by scanning this QR code for Via incognit docomo plan with the code F TV with the family and friends plan you can invite up to four additional people always handle your personal data with care Jerry Jacobson is one of those just incredible characters in American True Crime history because

he was a he was at one stage a good guy uh a police officer uh in in Florida as a kid Jerry is obsessed with becoming an FBI agent when he starts working as a police officer it seems like he's on that track but his career in law enforcement is very brief he develops health problems and is unable to continue later he finds a job in security at Simon marketing this is where he really finds his stride he's known for being Ultra professional and Ultra fastidious so he quickly Rises to the ranks in just a

few years he's earning six times his police officer salary it's the end of the'80s Jerry is now the head of security at Simon marketing McDonald's outsources almost all of their promotional activity to the company so when the chain comes up with the ingenious idea of starting a monopoly promotion Simon marketing is Task with producing and distributing the game pieces so it was Jerry's job to ensure the security of the entire promotion so he arrived at work he had to supervise the big superc computer that would draw the winning piece he would supervise the technicians who

were putting the winning tokens onto the packaging he had to personally scissor them out uh from a a printing press Jerry's a tough boss as a former cop he's obsessed with rules in security he's constantly writing up people for little missteps and he hounds everyone in the factory involved in token production even following the them to the bathroom and checking their shoes to make sure none have been stolen Jerry personally delivers the winning pieces to McDonald's packaging factories across the country he hides each piece in a secret vest that he wears under his shirt as

he's traveling around the United States feeling a little bit like a secret agent or a superhero with a secret every time he arrives in a new state he's carrying a secret piece that's going to make somebody a millionaire when new game pieces are released Jerry makes a big flashy show of how secure the process was in truth Jerry starts stealing from McDonald's his first theft is small fry at this point he only wants to help his step brother Marvin Brun out and maybe show off a bit to prove that he can so in 1989 he

gives Marvin a game piece worth $25,000 Marvin is the first fake winner pretty much a victimless crime right McDonald's is giving away the money anyway and it's not like the chain is some Noble charity the game earns them considerable profit plus Jerry later testifies that whenever the computer selected a Canadian Factory to get a winning token Simon marketing would allegedly run the program again so that a Us location was chosen in Jerry's view this means the game is already rigged in favor of American players so why not get his own piece of the pie and

then one day he's talking to his butcher in the local supermarket and he tells the butcher what's going on and the butcher says well I'd like to win Jerry agrees but he wants to make sure that nothing traces back to him so he instructs the butcher to give the prize to a friend of his and of course Jerry turns on his television one day and there's a commercial from McDonald's with a lucky winner on it and he sees his butcher celebrating his win and he goes crazy and he calls the Butcher and says what are

you doing we know each other you can't you we're friends uh so Jerry decides that in the future he's going to have to find winners at random he needs people that are not connected to him at all uh and so the conspiracy grows bigger until this point it's all relatively small amounts of money but one day Jerry receives a package by [Music] mistake and inside a blank set of anti-tamper seals from Hong Kong which means that he has everything he needs to open the envelopes and steal the game pieces for himself and then use a

spare seal to stick it back down and basically get away with the crime Simon marketing the company that Jerry works for hires an independent auditor to make sure everything's going okay remember this is a multi-million dollar promotion they have to be all buttoned up the auditor is a very serious woman she means business she accompanies Jerry everywhere and Jerry's always getting on her nerves when he wants to fly first class on the company card she insists on sitting in coach he's getting drunk and bragging to her about it showing off the empty liquor bottles he's

shutting up whoever will listen bragging about once having been a cop he's also obsessed with accumulating Airline points so he's flying to factories in random cities just because and the whole time she has to follow him she's watching Uncle Jerry like a hawk her job is to make sure that when Jerry hands the winning ticket over to a factory that everything goes as it should that the ticket always stay in a special security vest and they do up to a point the point where she can't follow him in the men's bathroom Jerry quits procrastinating with

a few quick deliberate movements he takes the envelopes with winning pieces out of his vest opens the seal and replaces them with regular game pieces he seals the envelope back down with one of his special anti-t temper seals the God sent from Hong Kong and slinks back to his seat like nothing ever happen Happ the auditor has no [Music] idea if the anti-er seals had not been accidentally male to him and the auditor assigned to him hadn't been female maybe none of this would have happened or maybe if he ignored the Temptation he would have

enjoyed a nice normal comfortable life adjusted for inflation he was earning over 170k per year in today's money but he went for it for Jerry the opportunity to control the game is no accident he doesn't believe in accidents he's a superstitious man I know that at that time this is this is kind of silly at this time he's he starts seeing uh psychics and mediums uh to reassure him he's a strong believer in paranormal and Faith healers so he starts seeing mediums and psychics and fortune tellers Jerry now has full access to the winning game

pieces but he can't cat them in himself of course that would arouse suspicion he needs to find fake winners who will pay him Upfront for the game piece his butcher for example asks a distant friend to pay $2,000 for a $10,000 winning ticket the higher the prize the higher the cost up to $100,000 Upfront for a $1 million ticket and it works but quickly Jerry starts to top through his Network he needs to put distance between himself and the winners he's on the look for middlemen well-connected people who can industrialize the operation and being a

super his person he takes chance encounters as meaningful signs so he's at the airport one day and he meets another Jerry Jerry Columbo and the two hid it off waiting there for their airplanes Mr Columbo is a very heavy set Italian American gentleman and Mr Columbo claimed that he was part of the infamous Columbo crime family Columbo is a larger than life character like someone who modeled his whole personality off of The Sopranos and Uncle Jerry is lapping it all up he's an Entertainer he says he's born in Sicily raised in Brooklyn he's got these

underground casinos and I think Jerry is just completely enamored by him and he also seems like the type of guy that could find Winners really easily Columbo even has an outof Zone strip club in South Carolina that he got designated as a house of worship in order to skirt regulations he calls it the Church of the fuzzy bunnies and he has the dancers read the Bible before they start stripping uh well I guess God hasn't talked to lately he came to me in a dream a couple weeks ago and he told me what I'm doing

is fine Uncle Jerry appreciates Columbo's ability to think outside the box it doesn't take much to rope Columbo into the scam Uncle Jerry passes Columbo a game piece for a Dodge Viper and Columbo is hooked he is also obsessed with the Godfather surprise surprise and has dreams of being an actor so he agrees to be in a McDonald's commercial waving a car key Jerry Columbo won a Dodge Viper and there are two one million he gets to live out his acting ambitions but it means he's now too close to the game to profit from it

directly so he has to start finding other winners which helps the scheme take off for Uncle Jerry Columbo is brilliant at finding new winners willing to pay and he sends the majority of the Kickbacks to Uncle Jerry the two Jerry's are making each other very rich Jerry Columbo keeps picking Italian-American men on the East Coast as winner and his father-in-law gets a $1 million piece not exactly the move of a mastermind mafioso to make the win seem random his wife Robin convinces him to get women and people of color winning tickets in other parts of

the country for a while it's all going so well but then everything changes things are not going very well in Columbo's marriage Robin Columbo's feeling like she might not want to be a mafia wife she's feeling a bit paranoid about life in the mob and one day she's driving with her husband Columbo and suddenly a massive Ford truck flashes into them and it's a horrendous highspeed crash and their car is crushed against a concrete wall Columbo is taken to the hospital where he takes a turn for the worse he dies a few days after the

crash now Uncle Jerry is alone he's just lost his super recruiter and he doesn't know it yet but the FBI is on his [Music] Trail who knows we don't know so many people could have called the FBI a disgruntled winner remember a lot of these winners they their lives changed minute they're poor the next minute they got a million bucks they're driving around in a Corvette there's a lot of jealousy there's now so many corrupt winners out there dozens of people they might be drunk bragging about it at the bar Uncle Jerry finds new recruiters

to replace Jerry Columbo's role some are dodgy like the drug trafficker AJ glom he's just jumped on for a 12-year sentence for shipping kilos of cocaine across the US and sells most of his winning pieces to buddies from the drug dealing business other recruiters that Uncle Jerry finds are seemingly upstanding like the Mormon Dwight Baker a beloved member of his church with no previous criminal record he's a real estate developer with five kids trying to get his dreams for a golf course and a luxury resort off the ground but he struggled to find investors and

he also owes tens of thousands of dollars and back taxes a windfall would really help him so despite his moral misgivings he gets involved in the scheme too but none of the recruiters are careful enough the winners they select aren't random back in 2000 when the FBI gets the name Uncle Jerry from the informant they know nothing about who it could be is he a McDonald's Insider is it even a real name McDonald's shares the contact information of all the previous winners with the FBI to find out who Uncle Jerry is the officers analyze the

Winner's phone records to determine who they were in frequent contact with right around the time of their win all these people who are seemingly unrelated and don't know each other were in contact with a certain Jerome Jacobson the FBI is sure they found their man but they need proof like a taped conversation with Jerry and a fake winner that spells out what they're up to evidence that no jury could deny they convinced McDonald's to run one more Monopoly game to catch him red-handed it's certainly a reputational risk for the company how would the public feel

if they found out McDonald's had run a game they knew was rigged but the company also wants to know who'd stolen Millions from them so they comply together with McDonald's the FBI come up with uh a Muk sting they create two big wins worth $1 million each they then monitor Jerry Jacobson and his Network closely and wait for someone to claim the prices they listen in on a phone call of a friend of the Mormon Dwight Baker huie he says that he plans to sell the winning prize to someone in Texas this someone turns out

to be his brother-in-law who tries to claim the price a few days later the second big winner is Michael Hoover he was recruited by Andrew glomp the drug trafficker now Mr Hoover is bankrupt and a casino Pit Boss in Rhode Island uh so a bit of a sketchy character so he Rings the hotline and says I found a million dooll game ticket so the FBI and McDonald's decide to go down there to meet him they knock on the door they've got a giant check you know the comedy size checks and a video crew and all

of the McDonald's staff are actually FBI agents who are undercover and so they do a television interview and Mr Hoover gives this long- winded story about how he found his magic ticket he bought a copy of a magazine and the magazine had fallen into the sea and then he bought another magazine and the ticket was in there so the camera crew listened to this very patiently the men behind the camera are undercover FBI agents and they give him his prize and they take all that evidence and not long after that the FBI descend and they

arrest everyone so the FBI fans out they arrest Uncle Jerry at [Music] home over 50 people were indicted and dozens of wins were proven to be fake Jerry admitted on the stand to having stolen 60 game pieces and for a while America followed the consequences intensely so many millions had played the McDonald's game so people were invested in the story Burger King tried to get a class action lawsuit together alleging fake advertisement the trial began on September 10th 2001 then the world's attention shifted there were bigger things to care about than the McDonald's PR Scandal

nearly all of the 53 defendants pled guilty including Uncle Jerry fines were issued and prison time was sentenced Uncle Jerry got the most $112 million in restitution fees and a 37-month prison sentence Simon marketing and the printing company who made the tokens were gutted leaving hundreds jobless and Dwight Baker was excommunicated from the Mormon Church the game of Monopoly was invented in the 1930s the decade of the Great Depression by feminist activist she intended to teach people about the evils of wealth accumulation by the 1980s the decade of greed the game's original purpose was distorted

McDonald's the multi-billion doll Corporation use it as a way to make even more money then that game was overtaken by an exop called called Uncle Jerry who defrauded the corporation of millions he turned himself into a real life Uncle Penny bags running around the United States giving some people money but taking more for himself the perfect American Fable Uncle Jerry lived the high life for over a decade but as anyone who's played Monopoly knows sometimes you have to go to jail it's just part of the game considering the huge amount of money stolen the high

price the investigation cost US citizens and the many people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own uncle Jerry's three-year sentence feels like a light slap on the wrist he's retired in Georgia with his seventh wife in a nice big house sure he has to pay back $12 million but at a relaxed rate of just $370 per month besides people who are close to him are sure he kept some Millions buried as a contingency plan that's just the kind of guy he was