How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions

https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-an-ex-cop-rigged-mcdonalds-monopoly-game-and-stole-millions?via=twitter_page

by DLay • 8 years ago

638 230 8 years ago

There was a similar story a couple months ago about the insider who rigged the lottery. I'm sorry, I don't recall the source.

In any case, the ones who get caught are done in by carelessness, and over-confidence. You have to wonder how many are not getting caught if they can manage these two faults.

mistersquid• 8 years ago

"The Lottery Hackers" by Jason Fagone [0]

HN Discussion Thread [1]

[0] https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494280

bb20182• 8 years ago

A judge in NH recently ruled that the winner of the lottery doesn't need to come forward and be a part of lottery press and therefore their name does not need to be released. The reasoning is good on the surface that people who just won a life changing amount of money shouldn't have to have their personal details flashed on the news.

However, it seems like being named in public is the best way to prevent fraud. Many of these scams are through second counsins' friends and weird sources. Now an insider could just go through their best friend and no one would ever be able to connect the dots.

horsecaptin• 8 years ago

The judge ruled that way because people who win lotteries tend to have a lot of life threatening bad luck after they win.

makomk• 8 years ago

Depends which kinds of fraud you care about. Being named in public as a lottery winner is a pretty good way of making someone the target of every fraudster, con artist and swindler in the area.

qbrass• 8 years ago

That's not what the case in NH was about. It was already possible to collect the winnings through an anonymous trust, but the winner didn't know about that before signing their own name on the ticket. The ruling let the winner do what they could have done without issue, had they known about it sooner.

mikec30102• 8 years ago

Except that major jackpots are chosen using physical apparatus and much harder to hack. There are multiple sets of balls, chosen randomly, the balls are regularly weighed to the thousandth of an ounce (gram? Can't remember), the balls are never handled alone and the drawings are supervised by independent auditors.

I'm not sure if I'm for or against winners staying anonymous. If they would require public identification, winners could simply change their name to smith. I'd happily change my name for a hundred million dollars.

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

The fact that a member of a crime family felt comfortable enough to appear on a McDonald's commercial as a winner seems to call into question the effectiveness of this strategy.

maxxxxx• 8 years ago

"You have to wonder how many are not getting caught if they can manage these two faults."

I wonder the same about leaks like the Snowden leaks. If Snowden could do this how many other people get access to the same data and use it for their own purposes be it financial, political or both ? My guess is a lot.

sametmax2• 8 years ago

Espacially since he was a low rank soldier with a sense of moral.

Now take a highly ranked powerful machiavellian person, and the scenario suddenly seems very likely.

ilyanep• 8 years ago

It's happened before:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen

There may very well be people who are getting away with doing it now, but the leaked data eventually winds up being used which is how you get caught.

dictum• 8 years ago

The story of Michael Larson involves a smaller payout from a 1980s game show, but it's interesting because it's more due to a hacker mindset than fraud (though he was involved in the latter later in life) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson

bena2• 8 years ago

The "Press Your Luck" guy. Amazing what you can accomplish when you have nothing but television and time.

rando444• 8 years ago

Sometimes it's easier if you don't go after something obvious like the lottery, but perhaps something equally or more profitable.

People were rigging the libor rate to make billions of dollars and nobody was caught for over 20 years

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal

ghein2• 8 years ago

The people doing the rigging were looking to hit targets and get bigger bonuses. There was pressure up and down, depending on personal and corporate positions. There were also issues in terms of perceived stability of the reporting bank - didn't want to quote too high a number or else you looked injured and could be dead within days or weeks.

While the LIBOR (and similar) rate had a huge impact given how many products referenced it, the direct trading is rather smaller and the direct impact of misquoting was small. Rates were moved hundredths to at most tenths of a percent.

Using the billions figure is hyperbolic and doesn't reflect what the people involved did or were trying to do.

If you want to fix problems in important markets, just like in code, you need a clear, detailed, and nuanced understanding of what happened and the motivations of those involved.

andrepd2• 8 years ago

And when they were caught... you guessed it, none of those criminals went to jail or suffered any kind of personal responsibilities. The institutions received fines worth a fraction of their profits. Zero incenctives not to do this again. And the world keeps spinning, and we keep getting fucked.

paulpauper4• 8 years ago

here is the story

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/.../money-issue-iowa-lot...

it seems many of these cases involve insiders

fma• 8 years ago

Probably Tommy Tipton. The NY Times article is a good read and I believe was posted on HN..otherwise just look him up on Wikipedia.

The Man Who Cracked the Lottery https://nyti.ms/2Ksihm9

caf3• 8 years ago

In this case they were caught by a defector tipping off the FBI.

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

Jacobson’s $70,000 salary was six times his police officer’s pay

How is this possible?

gonvaled• 8 years ago

Monthly salary?

smadge• 8 years ago

That would mean a cop in 1980 is making $140,000 a year.

bena2• 8 years ago

The 80's. Minimum wage was around $2.65 or $5512/yr. He was making roughly twice minimum wage at the time.

Even then, in 1988, that $70,000 salary was pretty good. That's the equivalent of $149,000 today. (Or $52,000 in 1981 when he was a cop).

gnicholas2• 8 years ago

Perhaps the police pay is just the base, not including overtime or hazard pay that make up much of an officer’s total compensation.

madengr• 8 years ago

Ha ha, I made $4/hr as a teenager in 1988. Then was given a big raise to $4.25, only because of a minimum wage hike.

jron• 8 years ago

Inflation.

Spooky234• 8 years ago

Government employees had sweet benefits and awful pay in the 80s. Inflation really killed them in the 70s and early 80s.

As the benefits got more expensive, salaries came up.

kswahl1• 8 years ago

I think you've got it backwards. Pay was good and benefits were shit. Increasing benefits and stagnant wages plagues public employees these days. Take the Houston Fire Department for example.

jaxn2• 8 years ago

Inflation. The same way I can remember paying $0.79 for gas in the late 1990s.

Also, police officers are not paid well.

jldugger• 8 years ago

$0.79 for gas in the late 1990s

Inflation only tells some of the story -- oil is marginally controlled by a cartel, OPEC. I seem to recall OPEC following a cheap oil strategy to drive smaller producers to close their wells.

xycodex• 8 years ago

How was this promotion not regulated? Sounds a lot like lootcrates.

EpicEng• 8 years ago

Sounds a lot like lootcrates

Which aren't (yet) regulated in the US.

minimaxir• 8 years ago

It was regulated in the sense that it gave the odds of winning, just as how lootboxes/gacha mobile games just now are giving drawing odds (since there is starting to be a crackdown on those).

0xcde4c3db• 8 years ago

It's been a long time since I've looked into this, but things like this generally are regulated (in the US). The sweepstakes promoter generally must post the odds of winning, and can't actually require a purchase of a product to enter (though you might need to pay return postage and wait 2-4 weeks for the free entry option). Some states have stricter requirements and you'll often see nationally advertised sweepstakes specify that they're not offered to residents of those states.

caminante• 8 years ago

To this point, one guy mailed ~100 letters to McDonalds asking for monopoly pieces. McDs had to reply with game pieces.

nathanaldensr• 8 years ago

A well-written and well-sourced article. I found it quite interesting. It's amazing how people seem to find a way around any regulation or control to satisfy basic greed.

roywiggins4• 8 years ago

The game itself is basically a thinly veiled scam anyway: "McDonald’s makes one piece from each set of properties extremely rare, so while thousands have three of the four railroads, the odds of pulling the Short Line Railroad—and winning a PT Cruiser—were 1 in 150 million."

Sure, it's all written down in the rules somewhere but it's an elaborate effort to disguise the actual odds of winning to get people to buy more cheeseburgers. You think you are 3 quarters of the way to a PT Cruiser when you are in fact barely more likely to get it that you were before you got the first three.

joezydeco• 8 years ago

Every season you would see classified ads (or, later on, Craigslist ads) with people that had Park Place and were willing to share the jackpot if they had Boardwalk...as if there were only 1 of each piece being printed.

In reality there were millions of Park Places tickets in circulation.

joering22• 8 years ago

1 in 50,000,000 is still better odds than “winning” a Harrier Jet.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.

glibgil• 8 years ago

barely more likely to get it that you were before you got the first three

exactly as likely

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

Our grocery store chain also does Monopoly annually, and I generally just download the list of rare pieces off the Internet, and check for them before the contest expires. I figure there's no point in picking out the commons unless I find a rare one.

mikec30102• 8 years ago

Most state gaming commissions have rules against these "almost got it" jackpot combinations for slot machines. If the jackpot is 1-10^6, then each jackpot symbol should be weighted about 1-10^2 (assuming a 3 reel one line machine). You can't taunt the player with many non-paying combos like JP-JP-(one space from JP)

greedo• 8 years ago

The odds of winning a free hashbrown, Big Mac, or Egg McMuffin were pretty decent. Most people with have a clue realized that they didn't really have a chance to win $1M.

lotsofpulp• 8 years ago

The idea of having a PT Cruiser as some kind of prize is hilarious.

ryandrake• 8 years ago

Plus the internal rigging so that nobody in Canada could win. Why would they even do that? It sounds like everyone involved with this Monopoly thing, including the people running it, was crooked as a bag of snakes.

ajhurliman• 8 years ago

At this point, I think it's fairly common knowledge that there are rare and common pieces.

scarface745• 8 years ago

So in other words, it’s no different than state sanction gambling - ie the lottery.

zawerf• 8 years ago

There's a frequently recurring thread on askreddit about exploiting loopholes. You'll be surprised at human ingenuity when it comes to cheating at corporate promos!

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/44tard/what_was_...

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/search?q=loophole&restric...

paulpauper4• 8 years ago

He got caught after only 5 years and kept none of the money, so it's not like the system completely failed...

masonic• 8 years ago

It actually has a lot of key gaps (and a lot of typos).

The game style (shrouded game pieces used to make winning combinations with a smattering of instant winners) predated the Monopoly branding by years, maybe a decade. We had several such games in the McDonald's I worked at in the 1970s, none with Monopoly branding.

kevinmchugh• 8 years ago

My aunt worked for Simon Marketing for many years. She was a designer. My cousin was pictured on a fry box once. All of their drinking glasses were McDonald's promos, much like a software developer's swag t-shirt collection. They had these Mickey Mouse glasses I loved but that had a habit of shattering into a million pieces under the slightest thermal shock or bump. She had a full collection of the 101 Dalmatians Happy Meals toys. We were all sure that'd be worth a lot of money some day. Looks like it's worth 50-100 USD on ebay now.

She lost her job, since this racket destroyed Simon Marketing.

joering22• 8 years ago

Similar stories happened to Bennie Beans on ebay. Everyone jumped on the tilip mania hoping to make good buck skyrocketing the price of beannies and making owner millionaire. Then it all crashed. You can still buy original beanies with very low serial number for less than $10, all the way from $4,000 people used to originally pay.

erikpukinskis• 8 years ago

Artificial scarcity can be a fickle mistress.

cycrutchfield8• 8 years ago

We talking about beanie babies or bitcoin here?

ilovetux• 8 years ago

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania

riazrizvi3• 8 years ago

Too bad for Simon Marketing. It raises an interesting question from a business's point of view. Who can you trust in a situation like this. Personally I would only trust a security expert to provide expert guidance but not have them do any execution. They would seem to me to be the least trustworthy, simply because they have had a professional lifetime of temptation and rumination.

Spooky234• 8 years ago

You setup internal controls to separate duties and have different organizational silos and discourage fraternization.

Then you audit the process and the work often.

vectorEQ2• 8 years ago

this is correct. power corrupt, absolute power corrupt absolutely. simple fact. it's actually one of the most basic aspects of security. This is why you need to split up responsibilities, and in some cases even obfuscate an end-goal to someone in the middle. That helps them not to see opportunities to corrupt. you can be very ethical, and say you wouldn't go for those millions. but probarbly in that case, ou already have millions (perhaps gathered similarly) or no opportunity ever present itself to you in such fashion because your employers take good care to prevent that.

simple example: what if you are the person to take, process and finalize orders at a company? You can take all their money. If you split these into 3 separate tasks, none of them can do anything. (because social factors will have more chance to keep the 3 in normal working order, where only 1 is easily to corrupt without 2 other holding them steady.)

It's unbeleivable such large coorporations still have these kind of issues. over complicated structures in my opinion, where people stop seeing the forest through the trees so to speak, and lose sight of these important matters.

mr_spothawk• 8 years ago

This is beautifully written. Thank you.

gojomo2• 8 years ago

I am less-than-half-joking when I say this sort of cheating could be prevented by:

McDonald's Monopoly on a Blockchain

fullshark2• 8 years ago

All the sweepstakes promotions I see now involve entering some unique ID code online, which makes them much less fun I think.

UncleEntity• 8 years ago

Yep, the last time I even cared about one of those games you had to text in the number to see if you won anything and twice in a row they came back as "already entered", think the employees were doing it in their spare time since it was just printed on the outside of the box.

Had I known the FBI cared about these things...

gojomo2• 8 years ago

I predict it'll be an app that reads QR codes, and shows you an AR version of what the piece 'really' is, instead.

Tickets can start as simply generic serial numbers, but a post-distribution cryptographically-audited process then upgrades some to winners.

cycrutchfield8• 8 years ago

I smell an ICO opportunity!

smileypete• 8 years ago

Bit of trivia: the monopoly character was said to be based on Samuel Insull who became Edison's private secretary and right hand man.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull

https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+game+%22samuel+insu...

Having successfully argued for the creation of regulated utility monopolies, he assembled a huge empire which subsequently collapsed in the Great Crash of 1929, investors and indeed himself were wiped out...

yareally• 8 years ago

Hmm, I had also heard the Monopoly Guy was based on JP Morgan (at least in looks), but I could be incorrect.

ibn_ibid• 8 years ago

Monopoly Guy

His name is Rich Uncle Pennybags

matte_black• 8 years ago

Was it worth it though?

ocdtrekkie3• 8 years ago

It's mostly just shocking to me there isn't more separation of duties amongst a few people. The fact that one guy could pull this off suggests some major failure to consider single points of failure. He did allegedly have someone with him, but they didn't even sit in the same place on the plane!

The mark of a good security expert is that they will tell you the threat they themselves, potentially, are. (This is true for IT as well.)

robmcm• 8 years ago

There also seems to be zero analysis of the winners. Simple analytics would have raised concerns early on.

I guess the company just didn’t care, as long as someone won and the marketing worked.

riazrizvi3• 8 years ago

They cared about the outcome enough to prevent Canadians from winning.

40four• 8 years ago

I think McDonald's could have cared less. They made & continue to make $$$ hand over fist with these promotions. The marketing for sure worked, whether anyone won or not. I used to play these games & I never remember hearing about any real winners. Didn't keep me from the dream of pulling one of those instant winners. People get excited for games of chance and it drives large amounts of traffic into stores.

McDonald's counts those millions good as gone when they start the promotion, but it's worth it since they assuredly get a huge return on the investment. They assumed Simon marketing was doing their job, and we shouldn't be surprised they didn't care to look analyze the integrity of the game. They were selling truckloads of Big Macs & Mcnuggets and that all that really matters to them.

Any-who... great writing, and interesting look into to a "game" I'm sure most of us have a connection to. Pretty amazing it was hijacked by a few people for so long. Really enjoyed this read!

eternauta3k• 8 years ago

Two things had to fail: the ex-cop, and the seals for the envelopes.

riazrizvi3• 8 years ago

He was already stealing in ‘89, six years before he got the accidental shipment of seals.

tomrod• 8 years ago

It's mostly just shocking to me there isn't more separation of duties amongst a few people.

Most business folks I know are more concerned about getting things shipped that work than what their potential toxic combination impact can have.

Buge2• 8 years ago

He could also just go the the bathroom with the tickets out of sight of his partner.

There should have been 3 people, and the tickets should always have been in sight of 2 of them. That way one person can go the the bathroom while the other 2 keep watch over the tickets.

js2• 8 years ago

Unless I missed it, we never found out who the informant was.

fullshark2• 8 years ago

It's implied at least here that it's Colombo's surviving family.

jaxn2• 8 years ago

I think it was implied to be the mob wife's angry in-laws.

herodotus• 8 years ago

When Jacobson revealed his scam, Hart, an honest businessman, found it too good to be true. But he agreed to try it, to “see if it worked,” recalled Jacobson.

I think I might have to revise my understanding of what it means to be an honest businessman.

It is depressing to me that greed so easily trumps morality.

duxup• 8 years ago

Morality is easy to talk about. Being tested is hard.

agumonkey• 8 years ago

It sleeps a bit like a shoe horn. Bit by bit shifting your perspective.

nameiscubanpete• 8 years ago

It's harder to be moral when you know you can do the wrong thing and get away with it.

dandigangi• 8 years ago

I remember working on a Monopoly game knockoff for Buddig meat at one of my first dev jobs. I wish we had put in nearly the same effort to protect the game as MCDs did. We had some "situations" also. Not this bad though.

mabbo• 8 years ago

There's a wonderful lesson in all of this to any current or future business owner: what is the minimum number of people in your organization that would need to secretly be dishonest to undermine what you do? And how much money is on the line encouraging those people to consider it?

In this case, the answer was one, and the amount of money was millions of dollars. Should we be surprised that it happened?

lisper4• 8 years ago

This is not an academic question. How many dishonest Apple employes would it take to insert a secret back door into MacOS, iOS, or iCloud?

tomnipotent6• 8 years ago

Probably 2-3 - no code at Apple is getting checked in without another pair of eyes looking at it.

paulpauper4• 8 years ago

a backdoor into a bitcoin app/wallet would be far more lucrative and easier to pull off (not that I am giving ideas). Icloud is mostly family pics and useless stuff like that. May as well go for where the money is.

clubm8• 8 years ago

This is not an academic question. How many dishonest Apple employes would it take to insert a secret back door into MacOS, iOS, or iCloud?

Back in the day, not many:

http://eeggs.com/tree/1136.html

tsumnia• 8 years ago

Though I'm speculating, I think this is where the use of Attack Trees would become a useful analysis tool [1]. As you mention, in a hierarchical setting, where does a connection need to be corrupted/vulnerable to become an issue. Looking into how different agents interact with each other, not only is the question what is the minimum number, but also how would the undermining occur.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_tree

cwmma2• 8 years ago

The interesting thing was that theoretically it was more then one person here because the prizes were in the tamper proof bags, the thing that really enabled him to do it was that extra package of tamper resistant seals that were sent to him.

fatjokes• 8 years ago

They rigged it against Canada? Can Canadians file a class-action lawsuit?

ramy_d• 8 years ago

Wouldn't even surprise me if this was defacto behaviour for most large contests managed in the USA.

jcl• 8 years ago

They tried. From the closing paragraphs of the article:

"A group of Burger King restaurants tried to get a class act lawsuit together, so did a group of unhappy McDonald’s customers in Canada."

dccoolgai• 8 years ago

Yeah, for me - across the board of the entire story - the most alarming thing is that there seems to be little blowback against McDonalds for this. Considering how much that promotion was "worth" to them and how much business they got because of it, they lost almost nothing for misrepresenting the chances of winning to their customers (which they could have prevented if they were a little more careful). If I were a McDonalds exec, the unfortunate moral I would draw from this is to rig the game for myself next time, because it doesn't hurt the company at all, really.

dtf2• 8 years ago

"Before each bi-annual game, Jacobson arrived at the drab Dittler Brothers’ office at 5 a.m to observe their Omega III supercomputer making the McDonald’s prize draw."

Does anyone know what the 'Omega III supercomputer' is?

tonyarkles• 8 years ago

It's a trickier one to find information on! Apparently it was made by Control Data Corp in 1979+. I'll edit this comment if I find more... I'm curious too!

Edit: It's pretty hard to find anything about it! Apparently the University of Georgia had one too, but I'm giving up now and getting back to work :)

Edit 2: Apparently it was IBM (360?) compatible: https://it.unt.edu/sites/default/files/benchmarks-01-1980.pd...

dtf2• 8 years ago

Great work! So I guess it's this CDC Omega / 480 Model III, as described in this March 1979 Computerworld?

https://imgur.com/a/8TKIqNN

(edit: and here's a manual I found for the Model I. Does indeed sound like a System/360 compatible. http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/omega480/22291359A_OMEGA_48...)

keithnz• 8 years ago

I often wonder with the McMonopoly prize thing how often they pay out, from my observation quite a number of people just threw out their tickets, so it seemed like there was a good chance they didn't have to payout

danso• 8 years ago

The colorful court case, held in Jacksonville, Florida, started September 10, 2001, the day before terrorists crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in Pennsylvania. The stunned news media quickly forgot about the McDonald’s trial, which explains why so few Americans remember the scandal, or how it ended.

In the months/years after 9/11 I remember that a recurring theme in longform stories was that their events took place shortly before or after 9/11 and had collectively been forgotten. One that I still remember is a Sports Illustrated feature about 8 Wyoming college cross-country runners who died in the worst vehicle crash in Wyoming history [0]. Though maybe in today's 24/7+ media cycle and attention deficits, plenty of interesting stories slip through the cracks on a more regular basis.

[0] https://www.si.com/vault/2001/11/26/314466/cross-road-after-...

jMyles• 8 years ago

Rainbow Farm. Never forget.

http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Rainbow.html

I have a friend who was there during this terrible incident.

partiallypro• 8 years ago

I am pretty sure the only way you -can- win the Monopoly game is to rig it in your favor. It's not a game anyone is meant to win. That's likely why so much is spent trying to figure out how someone won. The only prizes anyone is meant to win are maybe an Xbox and free chicken McNuggets. In some ways I sympathize with the idea of playing the unwinnable system against itself.

batiudrami• 8 years ago

If you know which of the three or four tickets are scarce (something that could easily be determined by a few enthusiasts online by collating their ticket data), winning a grand prize is as simple as buying more McDonalds until you have the tickets to complete the set. The trick is that most people who receive the rare tickets won't know and will either bin them or not obtain the remaining tickets.

newsbinator• 8 years ago

"The camera crew listened patiently to his rambling story, silently recognizing the inconsequential details found in stories told by liars."

I'd love to learn more about this. How do you separate inconsequential details told by liars from inconsequential details told by excited people?

trendia• 8 years ago

Liars provide more details because they get bogged down in the story, whereas truth-tellers give you a broad overview and can still provide a coherent story when pressed for details.

One study found this by analyzing insurance claims [0]

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316234/How-s...

misiti3780• 8 years ago

i just finished Never Split The Difference (https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-De...) and they also tend use different pronouns (they do not use I as much, but use other pronouns more often)

BlackFly• 8 years ago

If you look into studies of lie detection training and efficiency, you will learn that it is mostly confirmation bias on the side of the lie detectors: humans cannot really be trained to be powerful lie detectors. There is some new research on using MRI's to detect the brain pattern of lies, but it is still nascent.

chaostheory• 8 years ago

This type of scam can probably be much easier to spot with Facebook.

Any lottery game or house raffle with little transparency should be suspect.

jedberg2• 8 years ago

McDonalds was dumb for entrusting the security of this system to one person. This is like security 101. If you want good physical security, you can't trust it to a single person.

baud147258• 8 years ago

There was an auditor following him, except in the bathroom, where he was doing the switch.

jedberg2• 8 years ago

Right but the auditor was only an observer, not part of the process. You need to have two people be active participants.

halis• 8 years ago

Nice!

linkmotif• 8 years ago

Now we know who orchestrated 9/11: it was McDonalds.

Great piece. I somehow missed all this too in the 9/11 aftermath.

bsimpson• 8 years ago

I found this funnier than I probably should have:

a disgraced Ronald McDonald actor who was convicted of making harassing phone calls while posing as the clown

jessaustin2• 8 years ago

What was the source of the disgrace?

meandthree• 8 years ago

I knew one winner. She won an Oldsmobile in 1988. Interesting enough, she was a Mormon so and had to ask permission from her elders to claim the prize. This was in Minnesota.

johnsonjo• 8 years ago

Mormon here. Hope your friend wasn’t connected to this Baker fellow ;). Seems a little odd to me though that she needed to ask permission from anyone in the Mormon church to claim a prize. Normaly the only person you would be expected to talk to is your Bishop and that is under the circumstances of a large enough sin. You can seek guidance and counsel from the Bishop, however this is not expected.

By the way random facts, but we prefer calling ourselves and being called members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (LDS Church) instead of Mormons. Mormon was the name of an ancient American prophet-historian who abridged records of other prophets into a book of scripture which would later be called The Book of Mormon. We by no means worship Mormon, but instead Christ that’s why we prefer the other name.

lpolovets• 8 years ago

A fun-to-read-about (but not illegal) sweepstakes hack was done by a bunch of Caltech students in the 70s. Coincidentally, McDonald's was the target there, too. http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_...

flashman• 8 years ago

Jacobson sent a $1m winning ticket to a hospital, where the donations clerk immediately turned it in. Imagine what would have happened if she'd decided to keep it for herself? I wonder whether and how Jacobson would have taken steps to expose her, without exposing himself.

vectorEQ2• 8 years ago

ripping off one big corporate via a game named to a big banker. classic. they should give this man a medal!

optiflex2• 8 years ago

I stopped reading the article as soon as they got to the part about him checking all the employees and even following them into the bathroom(Illegal BTW). This is why police departments have INTERNAL AFFAIRS DEPT. Just like pedophiles find a position of trust to prey upon kids, really accomplished scammers find one to take advantage of security. Where would a better position be than to head up the security! When they started giving examples of him check shoes, it reminded me that in my lifetime I realized the worse thieves are always worried about getting robbed! Because they figure if they thought of it, so haven't others. I was reading before that about all his ailments prior and thinking, the author hasn't figured out those were scams ..too!

cwmma2• 8 years ago

Not long afterward, Jacobson opened a package sent to him by mistake from a supplier in Hong Kong. Inside he found a set of the anti-tamper seals for the game piece envelopes—the only thing he needed to steal game pieces en route to the factory.

While most people are focusing on the lack of human controls that allowed there to be a single person who could pull this off, I think an over looked issue was the over reliance on these tamper resistant seals. They had a single type of seal from a single supplier that was apparently used by itself to show tamper resistance.

This is actually less secure then the setup at the Starbucks I worked at where the tamper resistant bags had serial numbers on both the body of the bag and on a removable tag, so that if somebody was to open the bag (which you could only do by ripping it) and put it in a new bag, the serial number would no longer match.

danielfoster• 8 years ago

This and the fact that one person was kept in charge of security for so long surprised me. Simon Marketing should have periodically swapped the role.

lbriner• 8 years ago

Yeah and the fact that the supplier of the seals didn't contact Simon Marketing and say, "sorry, we seem to have mislaid a load of seals so we need to change the design/colour and send you some more".

optiflex2• 8 years ago

I came across a situation where an asset protection head at a Walmart was looking the other way while an acquaintance would dress up in a suit, and put an expensive vacuum cleaner in a shopping cart and waltz out the car departments side door minutes after it opened each morning. An employee noticed this. Asked the person for a receipt and the scam came to an end. The employee, however, got wrote up by the asset protection head!He claimed he was just about to apprehend this fellow. But Walmart quickly ended their relationship with their asset protection head(Within weeks), while NOT GOING BACK TO THE SIMPLE EMPLOYEE and admitting any wrong in his being written up. This is why when people rob these huge corporations like this, nobody should care. They don't give 2 craps about honesty or integrity. They are more worried about a thief falling down, breaking an ankle, suing them for millions, than you helping them not lose assets.

kdazzle• 8 years ago

Good story, but man, I think this story sucked up like 30% of my battery, and the ads didn't even load half the time.

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