So, this guy, his name's Jerome, and Jerome is about to steal $24 million from McDonald's. Jerome, he used to be a cop, but now he's the director of security at a marketing firm. One day, the marketing firm he works for comes up with a promotion for one of its biggest clients, McDonald's.
In this promotion, they combine McDonald's and Monopoly into a game where customers win free French fries, free drinks, or the grand prize: $1 million. This game blows up; it is massively popular, and Jerome, as director of security, is in charge of transporting those winning game pieces from the company to the factory. This is a very secure process: the pieces are locked up in a case, in envelopes with tamper-sealed tape on them, and they have an auditor shadow Jerome around anytime he has the case.
The auditor's always looking over his shoulder; when he travels with the case, the auditor has to sit next to him on the plane. McDonald's is hardcore. But then one day, Jerome figures out how to steal one of the winning game pieces worth $25,000.
Now, Jerome can't cash this piece in himself because he works for McDonald's; it would look suspicious. So, he gives it to his stepbrother to cash in, to see if anyone at corporate notices the piece is missing. And surprise, surprise, no one does, so his plan works flawlessly.
Of course, Jerome's like, "Dope, I'm going to do it again! " and he starts stealing more of these winning game pieces. He starts selling them to people he knows, and he makes a little cash on the side doing this.
This scam goes on for several years. But then one day, something crazy happens. Jerome is chilling at home when a package is delivered.
He opens it up and sees a roll of tape—the same tamper-safe tape they used to seal up the envelopes with the winning game pieces. I guess the supplier had accidentally mailed the tape to Jerome's house instead of the McDonald's factory. Jerome sees this and immediately sees an opportunity to make even more money.
So then, boom! Sometime later, he's at the airport, transporting the case with the winning pieces in it, and the auditor is there with him. Jerome tells her he needs to use the restroom, and then he takes the case in there with him.
He gets one of the envelopes, breaks the seal, pockets the winning game pieces, and replaces them with losing game pieces. Then he seals the envelope back up with the tape he got. He then later sells those winning pieces to more people he knows, and they all cash in—so much so that after a while, Jerome starts telling those people to resell those pieces to people in other states to make it all harder to track back to him.
With this strategy, Jerome starts stealing more and more pieces, distributing them out to more people in his network to sell. At some point, he even brings on a couple of recruiters, and they help him get his winning tickets out to people across the country. His network just keeps getting bigger and bigger.
He even jacks some of the million-dollar prize pieces; one of them Jerome anonymously donates to St. Jude's Children's Hospital because, I guess, he feels bad about all the stealing he's doing. I don't know, but Jerome's scheme is working, and he and his friends are getting paid.
Eventually, McDonald's starts getting suspicious because a lot of these prize winners are strangely clustered around the Georgia-Florida area when people should be winning all across the country. Plus, here's the biggest problem with this scam: with a system like this, the more people you involve, the more people know about the scheme. One day, one of those people—not sure who—hits up the FBI and they're like, "I heard about a guy running a McDonald's Monopoly scheme.
" This helps the FBI connect the dots back to Jerome. So, McDonald's execs find out about this and want to shut the game down, but the FBI convinces them to run the promotion one last time. This time, they wiretap Jerome and the other suspects' phones.
Then, when the suspects all go to cash in their stolen game pieces, McDonald's tells them there's been a delay in sending the prize money. This delay forces all the suspects to wait on getting paid, and while they're waiting, they get paranoid and panic. They start contacting each other on the phone, complaining about how they never received their prize money from McDonald's and how the stolen game pieces aren't working.
Since their phones are tapped, all of these conversations are used to incriminate them. So, the FBI arrests Jerome. Here's his mug shot.
They uncover his whole fraud scheme, and when all is said and done, over 50 people are convicted for scamming McDonald's out of $4 million worth of winning game pieces. Now, Jerome actually ends up snitching on his employer—the marketing firm he worked for—because, separately from all this, the firm was rigging the Monopoly game too, in a different way. That's a whole other story.
But because he snitched, Jerome only got 37 months in prison, and of course, they seized all his assets. So, shout out to the Hamburglar, I guess!
