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How an Ex-Cop Rigged McDonald’s Monopoly Game and Stole Millions
- chiefalchemist 8y agoThere 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 8y ago"The Lottery Hackers" by Jason Fagone [0] HN Discussion Thread [1] [0] https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winners/ https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16494280
- bb2018 8y agoA 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 8y agoThe judge ruled that way because people who win lotteries tend to have a lot of life threatening bad luck after they win.
- makomk 8y agoDepends 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.
- eric_h 8y agoIndeed. Anonymous collection protects the winner, public collection protects the game.
- qbrass 8y agoThat'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.
- mikec3010 8y agoExcept 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.
- bb2018 8y agoIt's not quite that simple for some of the games. This one was able to slip in codes for some rather significant games: https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/2018/02/18/lottery-scam-mastermind-eddie-tipton-more-rigged-drawings-multi-state-lottery/346762002/ https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/investigations/... He gave the tip to his brother. Being able to shield your identity would make fraud both more tempting and less likely to be caught.
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoThe 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 8y 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.
- sametmax 8y agoEspacially 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 8y agoIt's happened before: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hanssen 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.
- update 8y agoReally interesting articles. 2 things that stood out > Hanssen [...] is serving his sentence at the ADX Florence, a federal supermax prison near Florence, Colorado in solitary confinement for twenty-three hours a day. The guy made a deal to avoid the death penalty, but from what I've read about solitary confinement this can't be much better. and this: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldrich_Ames >U.S. mole hunters investigated 90 employees at WTC for almost a year and came up with ten suspects, although the lead investigator noted that "there are so many problem personalities that no one stands out"
- dictum 8y agoThe 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 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson
- bena 8y agoThe "Press Your Luck" guy. Amazing what you can accomplish when you have nothing but television and time.
- laurentl 8y agoThere’s a good write-up on this guy (IIRC this is how I discovered priceonomics): https://priceonomics.com/the-man-who-got-no-whammies/ https://priceonomics.com/the-man-who-got-no-whammies/
- rando444 8y agoSometimes 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libor_scandal
- ghein 8y agoThe 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.
- andrepd 8y agoLibor underpins USD 350 trillion (yes, trillion) worth of derivatives.
- andrepd 8y agoAnd 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.
- chiefalchemist 8y agoFrom the wikipedia link above: "On 27 July 2012, the Financial Times published an article by a former trader which stated that Libor manipulation had been common since at least 1991." In other words, this came to light under the previous US POTUS and - much like the crash of 2007 / 2008 - __nothing__ happened. It's amazing how much power the MSM has over the narrative(s) and public perception.
- paulpauper 8y agohere is the story https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/.../money-issue-iowa-lottery-fraud-mystery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/.../money-issue-iowa-lot... it seems many of these cases involve insiders
- fma 8y agoProbably 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 https://nyti.ms/2Ksihm9
- caf 8y agoIn this case they were caught by a defector tipping off the FBI.
- gnicholas 8y ago> Jacobson’s $70,000 salary was six times his police officer’s pay How is this possible?
- gonvaled 8y agoMonthly salary?
- smadge 8y agoThat would mean a cop in 1980 is making $140,000 a year.
- bena 8y agoThe 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).
- gnicholas 8y agoPerhaps the police pay is just the base, not including overtime or hazard pay that make up much of an officer’s total compensation.
- Phlarp 8y agoNot to mention official and unofficial benefits; health care and a police pension obviously, but also running drugs on the side, free prostitutes, bribes, immunity from other police, and near absolute power over other individuals in the regular course of your job. Not all of these still exist today, but many do.
- madengr 8y agoHa 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.
- deleted 8y ago
- xycodex 8y agoHow was this promotion not regulated? Sounds a lot like lootcrates.
- EpicEng 8y ago>Sounds a lot like lootcrates Which aren't (yet) regulated in the US.
- minimaxir 8y agoIt 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 8y agoIt'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 8y agoTo this point, one guy mailed ~100 letters to McDonalds asking for monopoly pieces. McDs had to reply with game pieces.
- nathanaldensr 8y agoA 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.
- roywiggins 8y agoThe 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 8y agoEvery 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.
- SamReidHughes 8y agoGod, I remember a kid at day camp telling me he had Park Place.
- joering2 8y ago1 in 50,000,000 is still better odds than “winning” a Harrier Jet. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_v._Pepsico,_Inc.
- slavik81 8y agoIt really grinds my gears that Pepsi won that case on the basis that no reasonable person would really believe you could get a jet. I believed you could get a jet. Granted, I was maybe ten years old, but so was the kid in the ad who won it. Not that I thought I'd ever get the jet myself. It just didn't really stand out as ridiculous when a mere mountain bike required 2,750 points. A 24-pack of Pepsi was worth 4 points. So, you'd need to drink roughly 16,500 cans of Pepsi for the bike. Or 45 cans per day for a year. It all seemed effectively impossible to me. But, somebody figured out how it could be achieved. That's amazing. I'd pefer they held Pepsi to their word on that one, but I would have settled for a big fine for marketing their product through lying to children.
- kevinmchugh 8y agoMy 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.
- joering2 8y agoSimilar 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 8y agoArtificial scarcity can be a fickle mistress.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoWe talking about beanie babies or bitcoin here?
- icelancer 8y agoBTC is north of $8000. Probably could choose a better "tulip" to make fun of.
- GW150914 8y agoPeople said the same things about their $4000 BB’s, until they were worthless. That’s sort of the point of an intrinsically worthless object of speculation and artificial scarcity, it seems like it can’t lose, until it loses.
- gojomo 8y agoI am less-than-half-joking when I say this sort of cheating could be prevented by: McDonald's Monopoly on a Blockchain
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- fullshark 8y agoAll the sweepstakes promotions I see now involve entering some unique ID code online, which makes them much less fun I think.
- UncleEntity 8y agoYep, 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...
- caf 8y agoYeah the last one of those I tried did the same thing.
- gojomo 8y agoI 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.
- cycrutchfield 8y agoI smell an ICO opportunity!
- smileypete 8y agoBit 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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Insull https://www.google.com/search?q=monopoly+game+%22samuel+insull%22 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 8y agoHmm, I had also heard the Monopoly Guy was based on JP Morgan (at least in looks), but I could be incorrect.
- ibn_ibid 8y ago>Monopoly Guy His name is Rich Uncle Pennybags
- eric_h 8y agoI would argue that he is more commonly known as Monopoly Guy - as this is the first I've heard "Rich Uncle Pennybags", and I first played Monopoly ~30 years ago.
- jfoutz 8y agoyou can be the citation on the wiki article! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Uncle_Pennybags https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Uncle_Pennybags
- matte_black 8y agoWas it worth it though?
- ocdtrekkie 8y agoIt'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 8y agoThere 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.
- riazrizvi 8y agoThey cared about the outcome enough to prevent Canadians from winning.
- Latteland 8y agoFinally, a us multinational who recognized the danger of Canada. So actually, the article didn't explain why we wanted to cut them out. It just was. I thought they suggested it was the marketing company, not mackers, but it wasn't specified.
- ubernostrum 8y agoAs far as I know, most US-based companies don't like doing chance-based giveaways with the potential to have a winner in Canada. Even though it's not that hard, it's still extra work.
- garmaine 8y agoWhy would that be a problem?
- js2 8y agoUnless I missed it, we never found out who the informant was.
- herodotus 8y 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 8y agoMorality is easy to talk about. Being tested is hard.
- agumonkey 8y agoIt sleeps a bit like a shoe horn. Bit by bit shifting your perspective.
- nameiscubanpete 8y agoIt's harder to be moral when you know you can do the wrong thing and get away with it.
- dandigangi 8y agoI 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 8y agoThere'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?
- lisper 8y agoThis is not an academic question. How many dishonest Apple employes would it take to insert a secret back door into MacOS, iOS, or iCloud?
- tomnipotent 8y agoProbably 2-3 - no code at Apple is getting checked in without another pair of eyes looking at it.
- gruez 8y agoyou're either severely underestimating how easy it is to insert a backdoor or overestimating how competent apple's code review practices are. remember that time you could bypass the root password prompt by putting in nothing?
- lisper 8y agoEven if tomnipotent's estimate is correct, that's still a pretty small number considering what is potentially at stake. Access to iCloud would surely net you enough information to change the balance of power in the world.
- tomnipotent 8y agoLook how difficult it is getting two or more developers to agree on "small" things like code formatting conventions or serialization frameworks. Finding two or more people in such a position that would knowingly break the law by colluding together in some grande conspiracy with the necessary access and privileges to code/production process is the stuff of movies.
- SenseiMaster 8y agoJacobson signed a plea deal for 15 years but only got 37 months?
- fatjokes 8y agoThey rigged it against Canada? Can Canadians file a class-action lawsuit?
- ramy_d 8y agoWouldn't even surprise me if this was defacto behaviour for most large contests managed in the USA.
- jcl 8y agoThey 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 8y agoYeah, 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.
- dtf 8y 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 8y agoIt'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.pdf https://it.unt.edu/sites/default/files/benchmarks-01-1980.pd...
- dtf 8y agoGreat work! So I guess it's this CDC Omega / 480 Model III, as described in this March 1979 Computerworld? https://imgur.com/a/8TKIqNN 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_480_Functional_Characteristics_May77.pdf http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/omega480/22291359A_OMEGA_48...)
- keithnz 8y agoI 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
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- danso 8y 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-a-road-trip-to-celebrate-their-bonding-as-a-team-eight-university-of-wyoming-runners-made-the-fateful-choice-to-head-home-on-the-states-most-treacherous-highway https://www.si.com/vault/2001/11/26/314466/cross-road-after-...
- jMyles 8y agoRainbow Farm. Never forget. http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Rainbow.html http://www.november.org/stayinfo/breaking/Rainbow.html I have a friend who was there during this terrible incident.
- partiallypro 8y agoI 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 8y agoIf 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 8y 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 8y agoLiars 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-spot-liar-Their-story-far-detailed-true.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1316234/How-s...
- misiti3780 8y agoi just finished Never Split The Difference (https://www.amazon.com/Never-Split-Difference-Negotiating-Depended/dp/0062407805 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)
- barking 8y agoThis accords with a recent a high profile rape case in the UK involving rugby players where the defence barrister was questioning the alleged victim's account because she kept using 'you' rather than 'I' when describing her behaviour during the alleged rape. (The players were found not guilty in court but not on media and social media and were fired.)
- mjohn 8y agoOr perhaps she found the experience traumatic and wanted to disassociate herself when describing the events? It's dangerous to read too much into how people describe traumatic experiences.
- chaostheory 8y agoThis type of scam can probably be much easier to spot with Facebook. Any lottery game or house raffle with little transparency should be suspect.
- jedberg 8y agoMcDonalds 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 8y agoThere was an auditor following him, except in the bathroom, where he was doing the switch.
- jedberg 8y agoRight but the auditor was only an observer, not part of the process. You need to have two people be active participants.
- halis 8y agoNice!
- linkmotif 8y agoNow we know who orchestrated 9/11: it was McDonalds. Great piece. I somehow missed all this too in the 9/11 aftermath.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- bsimpson 8y agoI 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
- jessaustin 8y agoWhat was the source of the disgrace?
- meandthree 8y agoI 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 8y agoMormon 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 8y agoA 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_caper http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/the_caltech_sweepstakes_...
- flashman 8y agoJacobson 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.
- icantdrive55 8y ago"The page was reloaded do to blah, blah, blah."" And I will avoid thedsilybeast.com due to being greedy with lousy built ads. And no--it's on a new iPad. Maybe the company responsible for more deaths to to fatty processed food sound just not gamble? There's larceny and deceit in everyone. The one's who deny it are usually the worst offenders. In my warped world, this is the only thing that suprised me, besides seemingly bored FBI stooges; Jacobson claimed he was ordered to ensure that no high-level prizes ever reached the Great White North. “I knew what we were doing in Canada was wrong,” Jacobson recalled. “Sooner or later somebody was going to be asking questions about why there were no winners in Canada.” Believing the game was rigged, he decided to cash in too. Why not give some love to Canada? They are obese too? At least the gave health insurance?
- vectorEQ 8y agoripping off one big corporate via a game named to a big banker. classic. they should give this man a medal!
- ataturk 8y agoI can't even read this. The amount of corruption at every level in the US is astounding and we get an article about how the FBI wasted its time busting an unemployed loser and his buddies who tried to rip off McDonald's? McDonald's has been ripping us all off for decades and nobody believed that it was actually possible to win the million dollars except really stupid people! Fuck McDonald's, I mean this whole article just promotes their Monopoly game and tells you how people rigged the game to pick the winners. I'm still in total disbelief there ever were really any winners, so color me skeptical that the entire Daily Beast article isn't just more myth-making. But I guess it does stand to reason that if there's really major prizes to be won that someone would be there to try and maneuver and/or steal them. What I'm most in disbelief about is that the FBI didn't get their own corrupt paws on the money somehow and get involved in the mess because John Ashcroft wasn't exactly Mother Theresa. I do wonder how awesome the "Omega III supercomputer" would look by today's smartphone standards, however.
- optiflex 8y agoI 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!
- cwmma 8y 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 8y agoThis 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 8y agoYeah 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".
- optiflex 8y agoI 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 8y agoGood story, but man, I think this story sucked up like 30% of my battery, and the ads didn't even load half the time.