(Photo Source: HBO)

HBO reveals scam behind McDonald’s Monopoly game

A six-series documentary, “McMillion$,” is coming to HBO beginning Monday, February 3. The series follows the story of how McDonald’s was swindled out of more than $20 million dollars over twenty years via a Monopoly promotion, in which the winning tickets were stolen and sold to phony “winners.”

Prizes that the scammers won included cars, boats, and a $1 million cash prize.

The docu-series is produced by actor Mark Wahlberg, who said the scam was “fascinating.”

“Anything that usually comes easy is probably too good to be true,” Wahlberg said. “If somebody comes to you and says, ‘Here, have a $1 million game-winning ticket,’ it’s pretty hard not to think, ‘Well, I’m not hurting anybody.'”

But many of the people caught up in the scheme paid a price, including bribes to the scammers and huge tax bills. James Hernandez, who co-directed the series, says the scheme tested the participants’ “moral compass.”

“First, getting into this, you think, ‘OK, there’s a criminal side to this. They’re criminals,’ and that’s all you think. And then you meet the people that actually did this, and you realize they’re humans, just like we are…And they’re not necessarily villains,” Hernandez said. “Sometimes you have … the thing where you want to believe something’s true so bad, you’re willfully ignorant to what some of the circumstances around it really are.”