That seems like such a light punishment. I guess it was a good deal to be a friend of a friend in this scheme.
Baker, who was excommunicated from the Mormon church, his wife Linda, her sister Brenda Phenis, and the dozens of other “winners” received only probation and are still paying back their prize money at $50 a month.
That seems like such a light punishment. I guess it was a good deal to be a friend of a friend in this scheme.
Like winning the Powerball, the odds of Hoover’s win were 1 in 250 million. There were two ways to win the Monopoly grand prize: find the “Instant Win” game piece like Hoover, or match Park Place with the elusive Boardwalk to choose between a heavily-taxed lump sum or $50,000 checks every year for 20 years. Just like the Monopoly board game, which was invented as a warning about the destructive nature of greed, players traded game pieces to win, or outbid each other on eBay. Armed robbers even held up restaurants demanding Monopoly tickets. “Don’t go to jail! Go to McDonald’s and play Monopoly for real!” cried Rich Uncle Pennybags, the game’s mustachioed mascot, on TV commercials that sent customers flocking to buy more food. Monopoly quickly became the company’s most lucrative marketing device since the Happy Meal.
They suspected that Hoover was not a lucky winner, but part of a major criminal conspiracy to defraud the fast food chain of millions of dollars. The two men behind the camera were not from McDonald’s. They were undercover agents from the FBI.
That seems like such a light punishment. I guess it was a good deal to be a friend of a friend in this scheme.
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