
The McDonalds Monopoly Fraud (2014) - ValG
http://priceonomics.com/the-mcdonalds-monopoly-fraud/
======
jimrandomh
So, McDonalds bundled lottery tickets with all their products. The lottery
structure was set up to deceive people who didn't think about it too hard, by
making buyers collect sets in which one out of the set was orders of magnitude
rarer than the others, but getting the common ones would make them feel like
they had made progress. Then, for six years, every single one of the large
prizes gets stolen by an employee.

Why are companies allowed to bundle lottery tickets with their products? It's
no less of a tax on stupidity than the standalone lotteries are.

~~~
ams6110
Purchase is not required to play these games. You can walk into a McDonald's
and ask for a game piece and they have to give you one.

~~~
jimrandomh
That sounds like little more than a theoretical loophole. Almost no one will
pay the time and fuel cost to go to a McDonald's if they aren't going to eat
anything, and McDonald's knows this.

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oldmanjay
Trivially, there are tremendous numbers of people who, by dint of their normal
day-to-day, need expend no effort to get to McDonalds. Have you other
objections that can be addressed?

~~~
jsprogrammer
People are buying the food. The "lottery ticket" you get is just a marketing
gimmick, not an actual game of chance in exchange for money.

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RockyMcNuts
Then there's the woman with a Stanford Ph.D. in statistics who has won
million-dollar lottery prizes 4 times -
[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023514/Joan-R-
Ginth...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2023514/Joan-R-Ginther-won-
lottery-4-times-Stanford-University-statistics-PhD.html)

~~~
nl
She has a friend (Anna Morales) who's won a number of smaller prizes too[1].
Seems a _fairly_ unlikely co-incidence.

There's the Canadian statistician who found a weakness in the algorithm
producing "random" scratchie tickets[2].

[1]
[http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/How_lottery_l...](http://www.philly.com/philly/news/nation_world/How_lottery_legend_Joan_Ginther_used_odds_Uncle_Sam_to_win_millions.html)

[2]
[http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/](http://www.wired.com/2011/01/ff_lottery/)

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vinchuco
>Jacobson oversaw a security process that began at a printing plant where
pieces were made, separated by value and stored in a vault. He was responsible
for transporting those pieces...

Thinking a system is secure just because there is a process in place, however
careless the design, seems like a recurring theme (society?).

I wonder if it's a psychological bias (or lack of security awareness) in the
sense that you'd rather trust an system you can observe than a secure black
box. Or maybe it is the fact that the workings of the system in place can act
as a distraction to its possible flaws?

~~~
thearn4
> Thinking a system is secure just because there is a process in place

ISO certification in a nutshell

~~~
vidarh
More like, people who misunderstand what ISO 9001 certification means in a
nutshell.

ISO-9001 is not meant to certify quality, but to certify that your quality
management meets certain criteria, so that relevant information is recorded
and made available for people to judge if if meets their requirements.

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lemevi
The $1mm donation to St Jude's was pretty classy, even given the crooked scam.
I hope it helps some kids.

~~~
peteretep
You don't get to have a brand as profitable as McDs by quibbling over minor
gifts to charities

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lenomad
The gift was not by McDonald's but by the scammer!

~~~
peteretep
The initial gift was the scammer. The decision to continue paying it out was
McDs gift.

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minimaxir
See also: the discussion thread on Reddit, where the submission there likely
led to the submission here:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3um3zh/til_t...](https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3um3zh/til_that_from_1995_to_2000_the_winner_of_the/)

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Steko
For the current NFL promotion they have game pieces on the medium drink, large
fries and big mac (and some other sandwiches/main items but not all of them).
So if you order the big mac meal with an upgraded fries but regular drink you
get 3 pieces but if, like me, you unhack the system by ordering a quarter
pounder meal with upgraded drink only you get zero game pieces.

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Igglyboo
Does McDonalds do monopoly anymore? I noticed the article is from 2014 but
this year they've been doing a similar promotion but centered around the NFL.

~~~
madeofpalk
They did it this year in Australia.

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NickNameNick
And NZ

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grecy
And Canada

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gPphX
There were also game pieces distributed in Sunday newspapers.

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nodesocket
Somewhat unrelated, but there is a great documentary on Michael Larson; who
figured out a software randomness flaw in the game show Press Your Luck, and
exploited it live on TV to the tune of $110,000. In that day, $110,000 was an
obscene amount of money to win on a gameshow. No game show was awarding even
close to that.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzNMCXWCZzQ)

~~~
minimaxir
The big thing about the Press Your Luck incident that people seem to overlook
is that finding the flaw was half of the con, _exploiting the flaw_ was the
much harder part. (that is, getting selected to being onto the show, answering
the toss-up questions, _and_ getting the patterns/timing correct). It was
more-or-less luck that everything worked correctly, and as noted in the
documentary, the con almost failed at each point.

The Monopoly incident in comparison is just boring manipulation of insider
information.

~~~
emehrkay
Can you explain the con and how to exploit it? Seems interesting.

~~~
minimaxir
Wikipedia has a good written summary of the con:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson)

The linked documentary is well worth watching, though.

~~~
emehrkay
Thank you, I tired watching the video, but wasn't that invested in the whole
thing
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson#Preparations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Larson#Preparations)).
That was pretty straight-forward and kinda simple. I wonder why the selections
and big money squares were not randomized, could it had been a computing
limitation?

~~~
minimaxir
> _I wonder why the selections and big money squares were not randomized,
> could it had been a computing limitation?_

Keep in mind that this happened in 1984. The board squares were physical
panels, and the panel selection software was analog.

In gaming, a random outcome is one the player can't accurately predict or
influence. The Press Your Luck board at the time fit that definition, but
Larson proved that was not a safe assumption.

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Patronus_Charm
It seems like he got a fair punishment for this. I guess for me its more along
the lines of victimless crime. If you gobbling down burgers to try and win
money knowing the odds, you clearly aren't that bright to begin with.

~~~
jMyles
Putting everything else aside for a moment: are you saying that people who
"aren't that bright" can't be victims?

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Dylan16807
More that there's no material effect to remove the rare prizes on a lottery
that are only worth a penny on the dollar combined.

~~~
ajnin
By that reasoning you should stop paying your taxes, since everybody else can
compensate by paying a tiny, imperceptible amount more.

~~~
Dylan16807
I didn't say the theft was justified. But I would agree that nonpayment of
taxes is not a crime that "victimizes" hundreds of millions of people.

The main value of the product is the food. Even if all the prizes were stolen,
I'm not sure if there would be a 'victim' in the consumer.

