Jacksonville ties: HBO series to feature multi-million dollar monopoly game scheme

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — The new HBO series “McMillions” tells the story of how the FBI took down a multi-million-dollar scheme defrauding McDonald’s through its monopoly game.

Jerry Jacobson obtained more than $24 million by stealing and selling winning Monopoly pieces over a 12-year period.

It was a tip called into FBI Jacksonville in 2000 that started an investigation into how the monopoly game was rigged for years.

After defrauding McDonald’s out of a whopping 24 million dollars, the pieces started to fall together in Jacksonville

The ringleader of the scam, Jerome Jacobson, an ex-police officer, was working in security for a marketing firm that ran the monopoly promotion.

Instead of putting them on McDonald's products, he was selling them.

Timothy Adams was a young agent in the Jacksonville field office when the investigation began. He worked in wiretapping, listening to Jacobson decide on the phone who would win the big bucks.

“A show about the mafia, that’s what it was, like you had the guy he was the boss, he had his captains. Most of their jobs was to fly around the country and recruit winners,” Adams said.

The winning Monopoly pieces were then distributed to friends and family members. A totaling of 53 people were involved in the scheme.

“Instead of inserting the winning game pieces into the product workflow [at] McDonald’s, he recruited someone, gave them the game piece and they became a winner,” Adams said.

The story is now a six-part HBO series.

Amanda Videll, the public affairs officer for FBI Jacksonville, said the series highlights the hard work dozens of agents put in to bring down the ring.

“There were a number of people that lived here that benefited from the fraud and I think it’s a story people have talked about for a long time but a lot of people don’t know,” Videll said.

Jacobson had to pay $12. 5 million back and was sentenced to 37 months in prison.

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