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How McDonald’s Found Out Its Wildly Popular Monopoly Game Was a Fraud
In March 2001, the phone rang in the office of Rob Holm, the director of Global Security for McDonald’s Corporation. “Holm,” he said as he picked up the receiver. He didn’t expect what followed.
“Hi, Rob. This is Special Assistant United States Attorney Mark Devereaux calling from Jacksonville, Florida.”
Holm stammered, “How can I help you?”
“I’d like to invite you to come down here from Oak Brook to have a little chat with us here at the FBI’s field office.”
“What’s this about?” asked Holm.
“I’m not really at liberty to discuss that with you over the phone. We can talk about it when you guys get here.”
“You want to talk to me about something but you can’t tell me what it’s all about? When?” asked Holm.
“Now,” answered Devereaux. “Oh, and Rob? I really have to emphasize that you need to keep this quiet. Nobody other than yourself and your team can know about this, okay?”
“Uh, sure. Okay,” answered Holm. “But can’t you give me some clue as to what this is all about?”
“I apologize. Everything will be explained once you get down here. I look forward to meeting you in person. Thanks.” Devereaux ended the call.
Faced with this mystery, Holm and two of his colleagues—McDonald’s in-house legal counsel Kathryn Mlsna and communications head Jack Daly—made the flight from Chicago to Jacksonville.
When the plane touched down and the trio stepped onto the concourse, they were met by a sharp-dressed man. He introduced himself as Mark Devereaux, and he wasn’t what they had been expecting. With his slick, double-breasted suit and salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, he looked more like a well-heeled yacht owner than a Fed. He led them to the short-term parking lot where his government-issued Ford Crown Victoria was parked. “Welcome to Jacksonville,” Devereaux said as they climbed in.
The ride to FBI headquarters was tense. Devereaux tried to make small talk, but it wasn’t clicking with his captive audience. The question hanging heavy in the quiet interior of the car was What are we doing here? Devereaux ignored it and instead offered trivia about the city of Jacksonville. As they crossed over a bridge, Deveraux said, “See that? That’s the St. Johns River. It’s one of the very few in the country that flows south to north. Unbelievable, right?”
The trio of McDonald’s executives smiled politely and nodded, feigning interest. What is with this guy? They were high-powered corporate people. They weren’t used to being treated this way.
As Devereaux wheeled the big black Crown Vic into the parking lot for the Jacksonville office of the FBI, the mood in the car began to change. The McDonald’s execs’ sense of dread and suspense was turning to irritation with the well-dressed man behind the wheel.
At the entrance to the blocky, completely ordinary-looking building, Devereaux drew his badge and led his guests past the FBI seal inlaid on the lobby floor. An escort of agents met them and led the group through sets of security doors—“man traps” as they were called—where they had to wait, stuffed into a cramped chamber, until the door behind them closed with a whoosh of recycled air. Once the door closed, the escort would key in a code to open the door in front of them.
Was there a more streamlined way to do this? Of course, but Devereaux was invested in ratcheting up the tension. With nearly twenty years of prosecutorial experience, he hadn’t given them the long tour for kicks or to annoy them. He had been watching them carefully the whole time. The agents who had been escorting the executives used the opportunity to study them as well. They looked for body language and any other little tells that might indicate guilt. To Devereaux, these execs were all potential suspects.
Were any of these people starting to sweat? Anyone looking flushed or flustered? Any nervous laughter? Any inappropriate attitude? Did they do anything that might be the manifestation of a guilty conscience? To Devereaux’s eyes, they showed nothing other than a growing sense of frustration with him.
They entered a nondescript conference room where they were soon joined by a trio of agents. “Hi, thanks for coming,” said a trim, sharp-featured man. “I’m Chris Graham, white-collar crime squad chief. These are Special Agents Rick Dent and Doug Mathews.”
The executives politely shook hands all around, gave their names and positions, and sat on one side of the conference table while the FBI took the other. All of them wondered about the young-looking agent, the one introduced as Doug Mathews. He stood out, impossible to miss or dismiss. While everyone else in the room was dressed for serious business in dark suits, Mathews’s suit was gold. He looked like a cross between Graceland Elvis and a McDonald’s French fry. It seemed incongruous for the seriousness of the situation, but nobody commented on it and Mathews offered no explanation. It was just there.
The two teams could have almost switched sides—except for Doug Mathews and his gold suit—and nobody would have been the wiser: buttoned up, buttoned down, and every hair in place, these were the representatives of two towering cultural symbols: the FBI and the Golden Arches. Both were woven into the fabric of the country. G-men and fast food.
Devereaux moved to the dry-erase board. He paused—again for dramatic effect—and wrote down a name. “Ring any bells?” he asked the execs.
They glanced at the name, turned to one another with con-fused looks on their faces before they shook their heads. “No. That name means nothing to us.”
“Okay,” said Devereaux. He wrote another name below the first. “How about this one?”
Nothing.
Devereaux continued the parlor game for several more rounds. The whiteboard was starting to fill with names . . . absolutely none of which meant a thing to the McDonald’s executives. Devereaux started to feel confident that these people weren’t part of any criminal scheme. He felt relatively convinced their reactions were genuine.
McDonald’s in-house legal counsel Kathryn Mlsna finally spoke up, a hint of annoyance in her voice. “Is anyone going to tell us what this is all about?”
Devereaux answered, “These are all names of some of the top prizewinners in your Monopoly promotional games.”
If the execs had a readable reaction, it was “So what?” The fast-food giant had, by this point, been running the promotional Monopoly games at least once, if not multiple times a year since 1987. Hundreds of contestants had claimed the top prizes: Dodge Vipers, Sea-Doos, trips to the Super Bowl . . . and cash, lots of cash. The monetary prizes ranged from as low as $50 all the way up to $1 million. Each time the game was run, there were at least two million-dollar winners. If the game was run twice within a year, there were four million-dollar winners.
Devereaux, always the showman, picked the precise moment to drop the reveal. “Do you realize that some of these people are related or connected to each other in some way?”
The surnames on the board were all different, but Devereaux started drawing lines and filling in information. “This guy, William Fisher? He’s the father-in-law of this winner, this Jerry Colombo fellow.” Deveraux continued drawing lines connecting the names.
The McDonald’s executives were caught off guard.
The prosecutor continued. “We ran the numbers. The odds of anyone winning any of the big prizes are about one in a hundred million,” Devereaux said.
The executives shot glances at one another, unaware of the specifics. Devereaux went deeper. “The odds of three people from the same family or group of friends winning”—he pulled a small notebook from his jacket and flipped to the page he was looking for—“are one in a hundred and twenty trillion. You have a better chance of growing a third eye or acquiring superpowers from a mosquito bite. But maybe this is just one, singularly lucky family. Maybe it’s coincidence. But in my business, there’s no such thing as coincidence. I’m sure it exists somewhere, but in my world, it doesn’t factor in.” With finality, Devereaux stepped away from the whiteboard and took a seat. Silence again swallowed the conference room.
Devereaux broke it with his kill shot. “The suspect game pieces go all the way back to 1989. That’s two years after you launched the Monopoly promotion. It’s entirely possible that the last twelve years of the game have been tainted by fraud.”
The execs were dumbfounded. They were not babes in the woods. They were experienced people. They had seen some shit over the course of their careers. Mlsna had been solving company problems with McDonald’s in-house legal department since 1977, when she was recruited by the company fresh out of Northwestern University’s law school. Jack Daly ran the comms team and was such a company man, he wore a Golden Arches pin on his lapel. If the company had an image problem—or any-thing else—he was the fixer. There was never a shortage of problems. He’d recently reassured a world rattled by reports of “mad cow disease,” traced to British beef, that McDonald’s did not use any meat products from the UK. There was no time to rest. As soon as he handled that bit of business, he was busy dealing with the fallout from the book Fast Food Nation: The Dark Side of the All-American Meal by Eric Schlosser, which decried fast food in general but reserved its most potent venom for McDonald’s. Rob Holm had been the director of McDonald’s global security for four years. Tall with strong features and a commanding presence, he had a voice to match. He was, as they say, “always on it.” Problems rarely fazed him. Now though, after hearing Mark Devereaux’s summary, these three execs were absolutely speechless. How did they miss this? They had so many questions. And for good reason. The McDonald’s Monopoly game was no inconsequential promotion. It was big voodoo. There was a reason the game had been around for fourteen years . . . and was set to begin a new cycle in just a few short weeks and run until June. The FBI realized it was on a ridiculously tight time line.
Without fail, every time McDonald’s ran its Monopoly promotion, there was an almost unbelievable 40 percent jump in sales. Those kinds of numbers were unheard of in the world of retail promotions. The Boardwalk Avenue game piece—the one that matter-of-factly read “$1,000,000 cash”—was a real-life version of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket. More than that, the television commercials hyping the game ran virtually non-stop during prime time—“Do not pass Go, go directly to McDonald’s!” After fourteen years of this, McDonald’s Monopoly game was wedged into the brains of even the most casual consumer of mass media. Beyond that, McDonald’s itself was Americana. It was pop culture. It touched everyone.
The game also brought the promise of fame and celebrity. Maybe not anything huge, but winners got play in regional media where they were often seen hobnobbing with Ronald McDonald—who was definitely a celebrity—and holding comically huge cardboard checks, each made out for a cool “One . . . Million . . . Dollars!”
But the hoopla wasn’t always confined to small-town newspapers and TV stations. Sometimes it went national. On a chilly December day in 1995, as the holiday season was beginning to ramp up, Tammie Murphy was in the mailroom of St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee, opening donation envelopes. She came across an unusual one and almost trashed it. For one thing, it only had the hospital’s address handwritten in black ink in big block letters. There was no return address. It wasn’t freaky-weird to get an envelope like that, but it was unusual enough that Tammie took note. After opening the letter, she got the surprise of a lifetime. Instead of the typical five- or ten-dollar donation, the envelope held a McDonald’s Monopoly game board. In addition, there was a winning game piece. Tammie didn’t look at it too closely—how much could it possibly be worth?—and wondered if she could even accept such a donation. Tammie called her supervisor, twiddling the game piece as the phone rang. She studied the piece a little more carefully as she waited. She almost choked when she saw the piece was worth a million dollars. It was a “holiday miracle.”
The national news media had a field day. Audiences loved mysteries and they loved the feel-good vibe of some selfless per-son out there doing something for nothing. It was a story that lent itself to many angles, and it seemed every outlet had one. There was Tammie who nearly trashed the prize thinking it was junk. There was the hospital director who broke out in tears of gratitude and sobbed, “Whoever you are out there—thank you. You are an angel.” CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather closed out a broadcast by using the story to assure his audience that there was still some good in the world: “Odds of finding this winning piece were one in more than two hundred and six million,” he intoned in his best grave, trusted broad-caster’s voice. “Odds of someone giving it away . . . heaven only knows.” Ultimately, the money was delivered as a “donation” rather than a “win” to keep everything ethical and upright, but a million dollars is a million dollars.
Back in the FBI’s conference room, the McDonald’s execs had to ask themselves, “Did we overlook an obvious scam because we were caught up in the thrill and excitement of the game and the attending hype ourselves?” That seemed impossible. They had been around. They had seen real winners. People had been on TV, smiling from ear to ear, jumping up and down with excitement. That had been genuine, hadn’t it?
Despite their initial findings, it was still unclear to the FBI if the fraud was limited to Devereaux’s examples on the dry-erase board. Given past experience, they doubted it. But even armed with cops’ suspicion and cynicism, they hadn’t yet discovered just how deep the scheme had gone: that over a twelve-year period from 1989 to 2001, virtually none of the winners of any high-value prizes were legit.
Every man, woman, and child who had excitedly peeled a game piece off a box of fries or a soda cup; who had clipped a piece from an ad in a magazine or a Sunday newspaper; or who had walked up to a McDonald’s counter worker and asked for a game piece (for legal reasons, no purchase was necessary to play the game) had almost no chance of winning.
All of the winners who walked into various McDonald’s restaurants across the country, waving a winning game piece and claiming a victory over the gods of chance, were cogs in a skillfully crafted conspiracy of fraud. From the start of one of the longest-running promotional games in the country, just about every single big-ticket game piece—including the one an anonymous do-gooder sent to St. Jude Children’s Hospital—was stolen.
Unfortunately, by the time the McDonald’s executives arrived in Jacksonville, the FBI’s limited amount of hard evidence wasn’t enough to warrant the resources needed to launch an official, honest-to-goodness, get-shit-done investigation. The list of potential suspects kept metastasizing. Attempts to break down how the fraud worked were still only theories, which only led to more questions. Were the game pieces being manipulated at their place of manufacture? How many people were involved in that process? Who were they? Considering all the cash and prizes that had been paid out over the years, one thing was certain: the scheme, however it worked, was successful.
Back in the Jacksonville conference room, with the McDonald’s execs no longer suspects, Mark Devereaux had a question for them: “What are the nuts and bolts of the game? How does that little game piece that we peel off a box of fries get there in the first place?”
It was a good question. A simple question. And it was a question the McDonald’s execs had no idea how to answer. They looked nervously at one another. They didn’t have a clue about the inner workings of the game.
This was unexpected. McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc had put a system in place that was brutally efficient, unwaveringly consistent—when you ordered a hamburger in Phoenix, Arizona, it was the exact same burger you’d get in Beijing, China, right down to the placement of the pickle slices—and clearly understood by every employee from the high schooler working the counter part-time to the executives sitting in the conference room talking with the FBI. This was accomplished by a company policy that required every corporate executive to put in a week doing grunt work at one of the company’s restaurants.
Before she got settled into her role as the company’s promising legal star, Kathryn Mlsna’s first week was spent at a McDonald’s in Darien, Illinois, frying spuds, mopping floors, and unintentionally messing up customers’ orders. But to truly get granular with all aspects of the company’s workings, all managers and executives had to attend Hamburger University where they earned advanced degrees in Hamburgerology. In reality, though, Hamburger University was more boot camp than ivy-covered halls. The training was intense. Every McDonald’s executive in the conference room that day could tell the agents the incredible minutiae of constructing a Filet-O-Fish sandwich or the correct method of cleaning a McDonald’s restroom, but not one of them knew a thing about the workings of the company’s biggest sales generator.
That was because the game was outsourced.
It made sense, though. Devereaux rationalized, “McDonald’s makes French fries and hamburgers and milkshakes and apple pies. It doesn’t make marketing.”
However, the McDonald’s team did know one thing: McDonald’s was planning to gear up a new Monopoly game in a few weeks. After that, they’d launch in Europe. They were concerned. Rob Holm, the director of global security, spoke up. “So . . . maybe we should cancel this thing.” His team nodded in agreement.
The FBI saw things differently. Calling off the game would be counterproductive to an investigation. Devereaux explained, “The best way for us to try to pull the rope in and figure out what’s on the other end of this is to have another game. We want to catch the perpetrators in the act.” And then he made a request: “We’d like McDonald’s to run the game—just as was planned—one more time.”
There was an uneasy silence from the McDonald’s side of the table. Was running the game—with full knowledge that it was rigged—the best plan of action? McDonald’s had a reputation to protect. The company was iconic. Like Disney, its reach was global, but its face was a sunshiny, idealized version of the US of A. Smiles were bright, family was paramount, and there was cultural harmony. The McDonald’s experience was woven into the fabric of everyday life. McDonald’s was America.
Not surprisingly, the McDonald’s execs knew they had a lot to protect. Each head at that table started to fill with images of scandalous headlines, lawsuits, and all the ensuing problems that could follow if this thing went public. The damage could be beyond repair.
On the one hand, the company was under no obligation to honor Devereaux’s plea to run the game again. Sure, McDonald’s had to provide properly requested materials, but it wasn’t required to participate in a sting operation with the FBI. There was always the option of just walking away and filing the entire thing in a folder marked “Forgotten.”
On the other hand, the company wanted to find out who was behind the fraud. Was anyone from corporate involved? Devereaux and the FBI mostly felt confident that was not the case, although Doug Mathews remained skeptical. Rick Dent explained to his rookie that they had to be open with McDonald’s if they expected information and cooperation. Mathews sighed. “Sometimes you just have to roll the dice to move an investigation forward.”
McDonald’s wasn’t in favor of condoning crime, but the company had to look at this as a business issue. There was always the strong possibility McDonald’s might get sued once word got out about a possibly rigged game, and whatever fraud had taken place over the course of the promotions, it hadn’t really cost the company anything. The prizes and cash would have been awarded to somebody—or nobody in the event of a winning game piece being tossed in a trash bin. So was this strictly about ethics? McDonald’s took them seriously. All employees, top to bottom, were given a standards of business conduct under which they were expected to operate. The document was forty pages long and covered almost every aspect of working for McDonald’s. All employees were required to read the document, know the document, and sign the document to affirm they’d read it. But how did ethics help the bottom line? Game winners, legitimate or not, created lots of buzz and the company couldn’t buy that kind of PR and advertising. There was a lot to consider. A decision couldn’t be made on the spot.
The execs flew back to Chicago to take the FBI’s findings to then-CEO Jack M. Greenberg. They knew that McDonald’s—like any other corporation—would go to great lengths to shield itself from negative publicity . . . and in the past, there had been some stunningly bad press, including a mass shooting.
When James Oliver Huberty, a forty-one-year-old firearms enthusiast, was laid off from his job in the private security sector, he reacted in a way that would become increasingly common in the United States: random violence. Armed with a Browning Hi-Power handgun, a semiautomatic Uzi, and a Winchester 1200 pump-action shotgun, Huberty walked into a San Ysidro, California, McDonald’s on July 18, 1984, and murdered twenty-one people and injured nineteen others. Why he chose McDonald’s—a business to which he had no connections—remains a mystery. The company had a serious problem on its hands.
At the time, it was the deadliest mass shooting by a single gunman in American history. Before a police sniper took out Huberty with a chest shot and ended the carnage, it was already being called “the McDonald’s massacre.” Pictures from the crime scene broadcast on the world news all seemingly man-aged to get in the Golden Arches. Sick jokes riffed on McDonald’s ads and messaging. “Over 50 billion served . . . and only 21 murdered!” These spread like wildfire in an age when the closest equivalent to the internet was the CB radio. This was McDonald’s. Everybody had a hot take on the story. McDonald’s vowed to reopen the San Ysidro store. That didn’t sit well with the community.
A petition opposing its relaunch circulated and gathered thousands of signatures within hours. McDonald’s was out. Within a week of the tragedy, Joan Kroc, the recent widow of company founder Ray Kroc, personally donated the location to the city. By late September, the restaurant was demolished. Gone without a trace. McDonald’s one stipulation to the city was that no other restaurant of any kind could ever be built at the location. Agreed. By that October, it was as if nothing had ever happened at the site.
The Monopoly fraud case certainly didn’t rise to the level of what happened in San Ysidro, but there was still the strong likelihood that the McDonald’s board would just toss the Monopoly fraud down the corporate memory hole, never to be seen or heard of again.
It wasn’t a snap decision; nothing in the corporate world ever is. Whether or not the company would cooperate with the FBI wasn’t Rob Holm’s decision. Personally, Holm was against running the game due to the level of risk it presented. The question was: Would Jack Greenberg take the easy way out or would he do what the FBI wanted?
The following week, Mark Devereaux had just about writ-ten off the company’s cooperation. He was at his desk when the phone rang. “Hey, Mark. It’s Rob Holm. McDonald’s Corporation is all in. The game’s set to start next month, so we’ll go from April through June.”
Devereaux hung up the phone. The clock was ticking . . .
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