The game’s up!
Exposing the multimillion-dollar McDonald’s Monopoly fraud…
An FBI team posing as a film crew to take down a Mafia-backed fraud sounds like the plot from a crime movie.
But that’s what actually happened in Florida after an agent started investigating a tip-off about winning tickets in a McDonald’s prize promotion being fraudulently obtained during the 1990s.
The story is retold using reconstructions, archive footage and interviews in the six-part McMillions on new channel Sky Documentaries.
Frustrated with the cases he was working on, FBI agent Doug Mathews spotted a Post-it on a colleague’s desk.
‘All I saw was: “McDonald’s Monopoly fraud?”’ he recalls. ‘My colleague told me someone called in and said the game was fixed.’
Further investigation revealed family links between some of the winners. Doug’s team contacted McDonald’s, learnt another promotion was imminent and spotted a chance. They sent Doug undercover as a film director making a commercial about the winners.
‘The greatest thing is that we had a camera rolling,’ says Doug, who filmed the next winner, Michael Hoover, whose phone had been wire-tapped. After his interview, Hoover made a call bragging about the deception.
It was the beginning of an operation that uncovered a
$24 million fraud with links to a former police officer and the Mafia. The ex-cop was working in security for the company who made the Monopoly pieces and was stealing the winning items, then giving them to people to claim.
For Doug, it was the fulfilment of a career ambition.
‘This is what makes my fun meter go!’ he explains. ‘Undercover is awesome!’