Stardate 20010911.0437 (On Screen): Man, you can't even trust philanthropists anymore. A few years back, during a McDonald's contest with big cash prizes, a children's hospital opened a letter and found a winning piece from the contest worth a million bucks. There was no way ot tracing where it had come from, but McDonald's agreed to pay the prize to the hospital and has been giving them $50K per month ever since. Now it emerges that the piece in question was stolen, by the same guy who was just caught and charged with stealing winning pieces from
another McDonald's contest. Evidently their contests have been getting rigged for years. This is really a major black eye for McDonald's, and indirectly for everyone in that industry who will try to run contests like this. When you're dealing with sums of money this large, it's inevitable that there will be a temptation by people to cheat; you have to wonder why it was that McDonald's didn't institute controls to ensure the honesty of their games. They'll do so now, but it's too late; the bad taste of this will linger for years.
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