It's very understandable because McDonald's has a target on them at all times.' 'And to be totally honest with you, they said no. 'At first reaching out to them, they were very skittish about it,' says Hernandez. In a nutshell, a shadowy figure known as 'Uncle Jerry' had found a way to steal the rare, winning game tokens from the secure printing facility used by McDonald's to make them, and then assembled a network of family and friends – not to mention a member of the infamous New York Colombo crime family – to claim the prizes and split the proceeds.Īnd while the FBI were immediately happy to let the pair scour through documents and files – and interview many of the key agents, including the hilariously enthusiastic Doug Matthews, and prosecutors involved, the intensely brand-conscious McDonald's took a lot more convincing.ĭirectors of HBO documentary McMillions, James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte. What the pair discovered over the course making McMillion$ left them as gobsmacked as the viewers of the documentary, which streams on Binge from tomorrow. 'At that point I called up Brian and said 'let's grab some lunch and talk about this – I think it could be really big'.' 'When it went through I contacted some FBI agents and they all said this was their favourite case and that no one had ever contacted them about it and they would love to work on it,' says Hernandez.

It was almost like they were waiting to be asked.

He put in a Freedom of Information request with the FBI for more details, which took more than three years to be processed, but once it was approved, the intelligence agency couldn't have been more helpful. Having fond memories of the game himself – his first job as a 16-year-old was at the Golden Arches – Hernandez did a little digging around, but beyond the fact that the scam had happened and some people were arrested, came up largely empty-handed. Hernandez's interest had been piqued by something he read on Reddit in 2012, which told him than nobody really won the McDonald's Monopoly Game, a hugely popular promotion begun in 1987 in which customers earned properties from the beloved board game which gave them a shot at winning prizes from cars to homes to the grand prize of $US1 million. The sometimes secretive Federal Bureau of Investigations proved to be the easy part. When filmmakers James Lee Hernandez and Brian Lazarte set out to make a documentary about the 'biggest fraud you never heard of' in which the famous McDonald's Monopoly game was rorted to the tune of $35 million, they knew they had to get two key parties on board – the FBI and the fast-food giant itself.

Mcdonald’s monopoly scam