The most ADDICTIVE promo ever made 🍟

How McDonald’s Launched The Hottest Brand Collaboration of All Time… And Fueled $24 Million in Fraud

I’m a sucker for games.

Jenga, UNO, Cards Against Humanity.

I don’t care if it’s high-stakes or low-brow, if there’s a prize and a little tension, I’m in.

Which is why my favorite game of all time isn’t the board game… it’s the McDonald’s version of Monopoly.

It had it all. Instant wins, rare pieces, and million-dollar dreams stuffed into fry cartons.

It turned fast food into a nationwide treasure hunt and for a while, it was the most successful brand collab in Marketing history.

But here’s the part they didn’t print on the game board:

It also became the center of a $24 MILLION fraud scheme run by a guy the FBI would nickname Uncle Jerry.

Buckle your seat belts cus we’re going down Broadway.

This is the story of McMillions.

The year is 1987.

Reagan is in the White House.

Michael Jackson just dropped Bad (shamone HEE-HEE).

And McDonald’s is looking for a way to juice their sales in the fall. 

The summer was McDonald’s rainmaker.

Kids were out of school, families were on road trips, and nothing hit harder than pulling into a McDonald’s after dad screamed, “I’LL TURN THIS CAR AROUND.”

But once school started back up and people settled into routines, sales slumped.

They needed a hit.

Something big.

Something sticky.

Something that would turn a $3 burger run into a weekly habit.

So McDonald’s turned to their longtime promotional partner, Simon Marketing, and gave them a simple brief:

Keep people coming in. Get them to come back. And make it fun.

Now you may have never heard of Simon, but you’ve seen their work.

These are the folks behind the Pepsi Points campaign (yeah, the 1 with the Harrier Jet that they got sued over) and countless other ‘80s/’90s-era promotions that made everyday life feel like a game show.

Simon, being the promotional geniuses they were, come back to McDonald’s with a great idea:

“Let’s turn every meal into a game of Monopoly.”

Think about it. Everyone knows Monopoly and everyone thinks they’re good at Monopoly (except me, I’m ACTUALLY good at Monopoly. Ari can vouch.)

Here’s how it worked: for every item bought at McDonald’s you’d get 2 stickers.

They came stuck to the packaging, like little cardboard lottery tickets.

You’d peel them off to reveal a “piece” of which there were two types:

1️⃣. Instant Wins – Stuff like “Free Medium Fries” or “Free Egg McMuffin.”

You peeled, you won, you redeemed it.

Easy dopamine.

2️⃣. Property Pieces – These were the 1’s that fed your gambling soul.

If you collected an entire color set, say, all 4 railroads, you’d win a cash prize.

Collect the orange set? That’s $50.

Land on the greens? That’s $10,000.

And then there were the BIG DOGS like Boardwalk and Park Place.

If you got both of those, McDonald’s would cut you a check for $1 MILLION.

But here’s the catch:

Most of the pieces were super common.

Everyone had Park Place. No 1 had Boardwalk.

It was GENIUS game design.

You’d get 1 rare piece and spend the next month chasing the other by buying more food, peeling more stickers, and feeding the machine.

So the game launches and it’s a SMASH HIT.

We’re talking lines around the block level hype and people went coo-coo.

McDonald’s ran out of game pieces in some cities.

People were ordering super-sized meals just to get more stickers.

Some didn’t even eat the food.

They just wanted THE GAME.

PUT IT IN PRACTICE The McMoment A big reason the Monopoly game was such a hit? It wasn’t just a promotion. It was an event. In the fast food world, McDonald’s owned September to October. That was their Superbowl.  Here’s your homework: Pick a moment and own it. Is it Spring Break? The Masters? Back-to-school season? Doesn’t matter. Just make it yours. Make people look forward to it and make them expect you to show up. That’s how you stop running campaigns and start building moments.

During each Monopoly run, McDonald’s saw sales jump significantly by 40%(!!!)

Those types of numbers are UNHEARD OF.

It was so effective, they made it an annual thing upping the stakes EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.

It wasn’t just a promotion anymore.

IT WAS A CULTURAL EVENT.

That was until the FBI got a little tip in 2001.

Someone noticed something.

The winners were connected by FAMILY. They looked into it, ran the numbers, and had McDonald’s execs come into the office.

An agent sat them down and explained the situation.

“The odds of 3 people from the same family or group of friends winning are 1 IN A HUNDRED TWENTY TRILLION.

You have a better chance of growing a 3rd eye or acquiring superpowers from a mosquito bite.

But maybe this is just one, singularly lucky family.

Maybe it’s coincidence.

But in my business, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”

Someone had gotten the best of the Golden Arches. 

And that someone was a man by the name of Jerome Jacobson AKA Uncle Jerry.

Jerry wasn’t a master criminal, just a quiet former cop.

But he was ALSO the head of security at Simon Marketing.

He didn’t design the game, he just guarded it and somewhere along the way, he decided to rig it.

SO HOW DID HE DO IT?

Was it a high-tech hack?

A Mission: Impossible-style vault breach?

A secret team of underground fast food operatives?

Nope.

It was envelopes. Boardwalk, the rare railroads, the million-dollar stickers were all printed in a secure facility. They were supposed to be randomly shuffled, sealed in tamper-proof envelopes, and shipped to McDonald’s distribution centers under tight chain-of-custody protocols.

Guess who oversaw that entire process?
Uncle Jerry.

At some point in the late ’90s, he figured out the weak link in the system: himself.

He’d sneak off with the envelope of winners, peel off the high-value game pieces, and replace them with duds. Then he’d reseal the envelopes and send them on their way like nothing ever happened.

Meanwhile, he kept the real winners for himself.

And instead of cashing them in directly, Jerry built a black-market prize network of friends, family, and eventually total strangers who’d pose as random winners in exchange for a cut.

The FBI caught him by wiretapping a recent winner’s phone and posing as the McDonald’s Marketing team, recording the winner receiving a big fake check.After the FBI left, the winner called Jerry and said something along the lines of, “THEY BOUGHT THE STORY.”

🤦🤦🤦By the time it was all said and done, Uncle Jerry had won over $24 MILLION in prize money and 37 months in the klink.

Simon Marketing eventually went under and the McDonald’s Monopoly game would continue on, but with a much tighter grip on the prize pieces.

(BTW if you’re looking for a side gig this summer, Jerry said he would do it “all over again”).

MARKETING CHEAT SHEET (WHAT TO LEARN FROM THIS STORY):

1️⃣. Create the illusion of “almost winning”: The genius of the game was how close everyone felt. Park Place was easy to get. Boardwalk? Never seen it. That little taste of dopamine kept people peeling, playing, and buying. You can do the same thing in your marketing. Build in tiny wins that feel real. Early access, mystery rewards, limited-time perks. People will keep coming back if they think the next thing might finally be the big 1.

2️⃣. Make it a ritual, not just a promo: McDonald’s didn’t just run a campaign. They owned a season. Monopoly became an annual cultural moment that people looked forward to. That’s how you move from being just a brand to becoming part of people’s routines. Want that kind of grip? Pick a moment in the year like Spring Break, back-to-school, or your own made-up holiday. Show up big, and show up consistently. Make people feel like it’s not the same without you.

3️⃣. Make It A McMoment: Monopoly wasn’t just a coupon game. It became a full-blown cultural event. People talked about it at school, made trades with coworkers, even dug through trash for lost pieces. That kind of relevance can’t be bought with media spend alone. It’s the result of crafting campaigns that feel communal, time-bound, and too fun to miss. Great Marketing doesn’t just sell a product. It creates a moment people want to be part of.

4️⃣. Familiarity sells, but scarcity hooks: Everyone knew Monopoly. That was the genius. It was instantly recognizable, zero friction, and full of nostalgia. But what made it irresistible was the rarity. 1 rare piece. 1 big win. That’s what got people obsessively peeling fries and hoarding game pieces. When your campaign combines something people already know and love with something they can’t easily get, that’s when it becomes obsession-worthy. Use a familiar format, but make the reward feel just out of reach. That’s how you go from seen to chased.

IN A MEME