Jacobson replicated the scam throughout the 1990s. The mysterious donation made national news at the time, though a source close to Jacobson later told CNN he'd sent the winning game piece in the hopes that the good deed might secure him a more lenient sentence should he ever be caught. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Tennessee. In 1998, Jacobson would pull his nephew into the scheme with the same offer (a $200,000 game piece for $45,000 upfront), according to The Daily Beast.Īt one point, Jacobson even anonymously mailed a $1 million game piece to the donations clerk at the St. That year, Jacobson gave one game piece worth $200,000 to his butcher in exchange for $45,000 in cash. Once he had a supply of winning game pieces, though, Jacobson needed to find some "winners." Since Jacobson couldn't claim any prizes himself without instantly exposing his scheme, he used friends and family to recruit people who would pay tens of thousands of dollars upfront to Jacobson and his network of recruiters to secure winning game pieces worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, all the way up to the $1 million grand prize. In airport bathroom stalls on his way to McDonald's packaging centers, Jacobson would open sealed packets of winning game pieces, dump them into his hand and replace them with regular, non-winning stickers before re-sealing the packet with his supply of seals. In order to open those packages without the auditor catching on, Jacobson had to sneak off to the one place the woman auditor couldn't follow him: the men's bathroom. Suddenly, Jacobson had a way of opening and re-sealing the packages of winning McDonald's game pieces. It was also around that time that a foreign supplier in charge of sending Simon Marketing the tamper-proof seals mistakenly sent a whole package of seals to Jacobson directly, according to The Daily Beast. She followed Jacobson wherever he carried the game pieces, double-checking that the winning McDonald's game pieces never left their tamper-proof case. He would take the stickers to packaging centers around the country where he would apply them himself to french fry cartons and soda cups bound for McDonald's locations previously selected by a random computer drawing, according to The Daily Beast, which viewed sealed court documents from Jacobson's case.Įven though he was the head of security, Jacobson was also under constant surveillance by an independent auditor, The Daily Beast noted. Securing the game pieces often meant Jacobson had to personally carry them in a case shut with a tamper-proof seal. But in the mid-90s, Jacobson figured out a way to rig the popular game so that the most lucrative winning game pieces would almost always find their way to people he knew - people who then shared millions of dollars in winnings with him, according to federal officials who announced the arrests of Jacobson and seven of his associates in 2001. It was Jacobson's job to look after game pieces for McDonald's promotional events, making sure no employees pocketed any of the prizes themselves. In the 1990s, Simon made the game pieces used in McDonald's promotional contests, including the Monopoly and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire games, where customers could win up to $1 million in prizes just by buying items like french fries or a soda. Jacobson, also known as "Uncle Jerry," was once director of security for Simon Marketing.
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