Game Winner

To me, there are a couple of interesting things about this guy's scheme to game the McDonald's Monopoly giveaway.

One is that he got away with lifting almost every valuable piece for six years before someone snitched to the FBI, and he had been snitching a selection of them for six years before that. As this story notes, the people who fraudulently obtained prizes were expected to return them, but just take a look at how long of a list that is.

The other, much cooler thing, is that the guy at the center of this all had also mailed one of the top winning pieces to St. Jude's Children's Hospital. But rather than stop payment on the stolen piece's prize payouts or insist the money be returned, McDonald's continued to pay the hospital its $50,000 annuity.

Of course, thanks to inflation, the "million-dollar" prize at the top of the game won't be worth $1,000,000 by the time the last payment is made. According to a formula here, it'll be worth about $833,000. And then there's what Uncle Sam grabs hold of, but that wily fellow has proved resistant to indictment.