“‘Are the people telling the story worth putting on film, putting in a documentary? Would this be a feature documentary?’”īut the very first episode makes it clear that the story was full of big personalities. “The first thought that I had was, ‘Obviously, this is a great idea, but how are the characters?’” Lazarte says. Making the story gripping-and demonstrating how the years-long heist wasn’t the victimless crimes it seemed-could be a challenge.

The McDonald's Monopoly fraud featured people stealing from a multi-billion dollar brand money that the company already intended to give away. And it’s not a bloody, shocking crime likely to hook and horrify viewers, like Don’t F*ck With Cats. It’s not based on a crime that dominated newspaper headlines, like Amanda Knox or The Disappearance of Madeline McCann. There’s no celebrity at the heart of this story, as there was in OJ: Made in America or The Mind of Aaron Hernandez. The Monopoly game fraud is a long-solved case, with little opportunity to pull in armchair sleuths as Serial and The Jinx did. Initially, Lazarte had some understandable doubts. Hernandez also reached out to writer and filmmaker Brian Lazarte, and the two would go onto co-direct McMillions. “So at that point I knew I had something.” “When I talked to the agents, they all said, ‘This is one of our favorite cases we ever worked, and no one's ever contacted us about it,’” Hernandez says. So the writer, producer, and director put in a Freedom of Information Act request to learn more about the case, and reached out to the prosecutors and FBI agents involved. “And I stumbled upon an article or a tagline that was a TIL: ‘Today I learned nobody really won the McDonald's Monopoly game.’”īut save for a local Jacksonville newspaper article, he couldn’t find much reporting about the case online. “I was laying in bed going through Reddit before I fall asleep, just killing time till I dozed off,” Hernandez says. (The story later gained wider attention in 2018, after it was the subject of a longform article for The Daily Beast by Jeff Maysh.) Still, he only learned of the little-covered crime via a trivia post on Reddit. “I loved that game as a kid, like most kids who grew up in the 90s,” says Hernandez, who worked under the golden arches in his first job after turning 16. It wasn’t until 2012 that McMillions co-director James Lee Hernandez first heard of the story, despite the fact that he was well-versed in the Monopoly promotion. The criminal trial that sprang out of this $24 million crime was, like many other stories ( remember Gary Condit?), understandably overshadowed by the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Mcdonald’s monopoly scam