Buying lottery tickets to strike it lucky is a shot in the dark, but we do it anyway because it’s lovely to dream about exiting the office with a final goodbye wave en route to a life of leisure.

Toodles, folks – I’m off to never work another day in my life.

For those attempting to strike it lucky in the McDonald’s promotional Monopoly game that ran in the US during the late 1980s and early 1990s, the chances of winning were even less than a shot in the dark.

That’s because the whole game had been rigged from the inside, in an incredible criminal scheme that has come to be known as the McMillion’s story.

Some of the basics below via the Guardian:

Big-time winners – the rare ticket-finders – were interviewed on the news and profiled in the papers. Except none of the winners was real. Or rather, none actually stumbled upon a lucky ticket. They were picked in a scheme run by a rogue ex-police officer, Jerome Jacobson, involving mob connections, false addresses, smuggled tickets and over $24m in illegal winnings – a genuinely crazy, rabbit-hole story of greed, deceit, and good old American scamming…

Though the facts of the case are by now well documented, the six-part series unfolds through the eyes of FBI investigators as they attempt to assemble a series of loosely connected clues – an anonymous donation of a $1m Monopoly piece to St Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Tennessee, a tapped phone call referring to a mysterious “Uncle Jerry” – into a coherent picture.

If you want to spoil the fun before you watch the series, you can read this in-depth account of how the scam worked.

For those who would prefer to see it unfold in the six-part HBO series, here’s the trailer:

I’ve read the in-depth account, and it’s obvious that this crime was tailor-made for a true-crime series.

The first episode aired in the US yesterday (February 3).

[source:guardian]