Harvey Guillén
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
They weaponize it.
They call it a sweepstakes.
For 12 years, McDonald's ran the most successful marketing campaign in history.
The Monopoly game.
The game Monopoly has come to life at McDonald's.
Win a McDLT, Coca-Cola, or run me in dollars.
We all remember it.
The peel-off sticker on the french fry box, the desperate hunt for boardwalk in Park Place, the promise that if you just ate one more Big Mac, you could win a million dollars.
We bought the lie because we assumed the pieces were random.
Well, we were wrong.
The winning pieces weren't distributed by chance.
They weren't scattered across the country, no.
They were in one man's pocket.
From 1989 to 2001, there were almost no legitimate top prize winners of the McDonald's Monopoly game.
The entire system
was hijacked by one man, an unassuming ex-cop named Jerome Jacobson.
He was the head of security, hired to protect the integrity of the game.
And instead, he stole it.
I'm Harvey Guillen, and this is Killer Stories.
Let's head back to the 80s.