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. It was then that Jacobson's multimillion-dollar scheme kicked off in earnest, federal officials say. For Jacobson, who reportedly earned about $70,000 a year, the temptation to siphon off the winning pieces seemingly became too strong. McDonald's ran multiple Monopoly game promotions in the late-1980s and early-1990s, but in 1995 the fast-food giant ramped up the stakes and prizes ballooned from thousands of dollars to a grand prize of $1 million. 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. Want to learn more? Click the audio button above.Jacobson, also known as "Uncle Jerry," was once director of security for Simon Marketing. So far, the game has attracted the attention of educators and companies alike. “It focuses on the system, and thus, by focusing on the system, we’re focusing on the facts,” said Telesmar. How much privilege you have depends on your role in the game. Debra “Debi” Jenkins, who works with organizations on diversity, equity, inclusion and justice projects.Įach person in the game is either in the role of a “systemically dominant” or “systemically non-dominant” player. To help illustrate how invasive systemic inequality is, Telesmar decided to stick with one major difference among players, after input from his mom, Dr. Enter “Disparity Trap: The Socially Conscious Board Game.”Īfter several prototypes and help from friends, family and a successful Kickstarter campaign, Telesmar was able to launch the game late last year it is now completely live. The unusual dream helped launch him into the board game industry, as he sought to illustrate how systemic inequality impacts all aspects of life. “The dice rolls of the game correlated to the race of the character playing or the person playing,” he explained. Telesmar had a dream about playing Monopoly, with one important distinction. But in 2019 everything started to change.
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