A former police officer Jerry Jacobson, also known as “Uncle Jerry,” who had changed his career to a security guard, has been exposed and is under fire after being implicated in running a scam that defrauded millions of dollars from McDonald’s over more than a decade.
Details about the case are still coming out. Again, the man was reportedly running a system that took advantage of the McDonald’s Monopoly, pulling in more than $20 million during his 12-year run.
According to Brian Lazarte, co-director of the HBO docu-series, McMillion$, the man’s scam started when he was working as a guard for Los Angeles-based Simon Marketing, and given the job of a delivery driver handling high-value tokens involved in the game.
At one point, he realized he could easily take the tokens for himself and replace them with fake ones, and a plan formed in his head.
His only obstacle was that he was not eligible for cashing in any of the prizes himself, due to his occupation, which required him to find partners who would do that for him.
The scheme eventually spiraled out of control when Jacobson spread out more widely than he had anticipated, and ended up drawing too much unwanted attention to himself by working with Gennaro “Jerry” Colombo, who was said to be related to the Colombo crime family.
The situation was being investigated but went cold in 1998, the case was then reopened in 2000, an agent named Doug Mathews reopened it and soon after more than 50 were arrested and convicted with many paying back what they stole.
As for Jacobson, he was slapped with conspiracy to commit mail fraud charges and served 37 months in prison and was forced to pay back $12.5 million. He said about his actions: “it was a big mistake.”
However, one year later, the Monopoly game returned, and in 2018 it was replaced by a new game called “Trick! Treat! Win!”.
Recently Deputy Leader of the UK Labour Party, Tom Watson, bashed McDonald’s and said that the Monopoly game was a “danger to public health” and told the company to put an end to the “grotesque marketing strategy.”
It is not sure if McDonald’s is considering discontinuing their other games that are similar to the Monopoly game as a result of the recent developments.
However, it would probably not be very reasonable to expect that from the company in their current state, especially given the popularity of the program as a whole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK2ZGOsbeqo
