As McMillion$ exposes, the fraud ultimately was traced to an ex-cop who worked security for a marketing firm hired by McDonald’s to coordinate the Monopoly promotion. We kept finding ourselves just being like wow, this gets bigger, and bigger, and bigger.”Īt first the FBI didn’t know if anyone within the McDonald’s corporation was implicated. And so it keeps on building…The mob gets involved with it at a certain point…The whole story was stranger than fiction. “They’re confirming that this whole thing is a lie. “They get on the phone immediately afterwards and call someone who is somehow connected with it,” Hernandez notes. The minute the phony camera crew left a winner’s house, the suspect generally called someone else involved in the conspiracy-and the FBI wiretapped those conversations. “It was so evident that these people were lying that is like, ‘Okay, there’s definitely a case,’” says Hernandez. “These were incredibly creative ruses to basically suss out whether or not people were telling the true story or not” about how they came into possession of a winning game piece.

Young G-man Doug Mathews took an interest in the case-as Hernandez puts it, the agent realized, “Hey, that sounds more fun than what I’m working on.” After getting his superiors on board, Mathews came up with an undercover scheme, “posing as a film production company, like a Publishers Clearing House style, where they’d show up to do a commercial at some of these winners’ houses…and tell their story on camera,” Lazarte recalls. “What are the chances? That’s impossible.” “This lead turns out to be that three people who all live in the same area…who are related to each other, have won,” Lazarte explains. It began in 2001 when the FBI field office in Jacksonville, Florida received a tip suggesting the Monopoly game-which offered customers the hope of winning everything from boats, cars, houses, or a grand prize of $1 million-wasn’t on the up and up. The tale they tell unfolds like a procedural. Hernandez and Lazarte are also nominated for writing the series. McMillion$ earned five Emmy nominations, including Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series, and recognition for music composition, picture editing and sound editing. “There’s probably 80 to 90 percent of cases that we, the public, don’t know anything about…We really appreciated that this was a story we actually could tell, and that we could learn about the intricacies of how agents work collectively, how they introduce new ideas…and crack this.” “We weren’t surprised to discover the FBI could be hardworking, doing a good job,” Lazarte tells Deadline.

Mcdonald’s monopoly scam