More than 60 million people walk into a McDonald’s somewhere in the world on an average day. Almost none of them are thinking about the company’s court docket, which is long, odd, and still growing.
The chain has been sued for $1 billion by its own Black franchisees, tied to an outbreak that killed one person, and accused in federal court of using software to work out exactly how much you will tolerate paying for a Big Mac. It also had its most famous promotional game rigged for years by one of the people hired to run it.
The Monopoly game was rigged by an insider
McDonald’s Monopoly looks harmless. You peel a sticker off a fry box, you win a free McChicken, occasionally somebody wins a car or a million dollars. In 2001, Jerome P. Jacobson was arrested by the FBI for running a scheme to defraud the chain of its Monopoly and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” cash prizes.
Jacobson worked for Simon Marketing, the firm in charge of McDonald’s contests. He steered the winning game pieces to people he knew, and they paid him large sums in return. By the time he was arrested, the scam, later nicknamed McMillions, had rigged about $24 million in prizes.
Meaning: for years, the big prizes every customer was peeling stickers for were already spoken for.
104 people sick, one dead, and the Quarter Pounder pulled
Slivered onions served on Quarter Pounders were the likely source of an E. coli outbreak that ran from September 12 to October 21, 2024, across 14 states. The final count was 104 confirmed cases, 34 hospitalizations and one death. The CDC issued its first public warning on October 22, 2024, with 49 cases across 10 states.
McDonald’s locations in the affected states pulled the Quarter Pounder from the menu that same day. Taylor Farms, which supplied the onions, also started a voluntary recall of yellow onions. Colorado Department of Agriculture labs tested beef patties pulled from McDonald’s locations in the state and found them negative. The CDC declared the outbreak over on December 3, 2024.
The lawsuits came fast. A Greeley, Colorado man filed one of the first on October 23, 2024. Six days later a proposed class action landed in the Northern District of Illinois seeking damages over $5 million, filed for Amanda McCray of Chicago and William Michael Kraft of Davie, Florida. “McDonald’s has a responsibility to step up, reimburse people and do better,” said Roy Willey, the attorney representing them. McDonald’s North America chief supply chain officer Cesar Piña said the issue appeared contained to one ingredient and one geography, and that contaminated product had been removed from the supply chain.
The company sued five activists and lost the room
Five London activists handed out a 1986 leaflet accusing McDonald’s of harming rainforests and misrepresenting the nutritional value of its food, among other charges. McDonald’s sued all five for libel in 1990. Three apologized. The other two, Helen Steel and David Morris, did not, and in 1997 a judge awarded McDonald’s £60,000, later cut to £40,000 on appeal.
A multi-billion-dollar corporation taking two people to court, one of them an unemployed parent, was never going to play well. Steel and Morris fought with little legal support, and in 2005 won a European Court of Human Rights ruling that the UK had denied them a fair trial. The trial, nicknamed McLibel, ran two and a half years and stands as one of the longest in English history. It resurfaced in 2025 with the launch of the BBC podcast “Shadow World: The People vs McDonald’s.”
The $1 billion discrimination suit from its own operators
In 2020, 52 Black former franchisees in the US sued McDonald’s for racial discrimination. Another 27 former franchisees joined later, bringing the number of restaurants involved to almost 300. Represented by the Ferraro Law Firm, they alleged the chain blocked them from the growth opportunities white franchisees received, pushed them to open in dangerous areas and denied them financial help. A Chicago federal judge dismissed the $1 billion suit in 2022 but let them refile, and in September 2026 he threw out most of the claims while letting some go forward.
Two similar claims ended in settlements. A lawsuit by Black franchisee and Major League Baseball player Herb Washington was settled in 2021, with McDonald’s agreeing to buy his restaurants for $33.5 million. In a separate case around the same time, the chain agreed to purchase four restaurants from franchisee brothers James and Darrell Byrd for $6.5 million.
The UK harassment allegations that keep returning
A BBC investigation published in 2023 collected allegations of sexual assault, harassment, racism and bullying from more than 100 McDonald’s workers across the UK. Many were young women and junior staff who said managers failed to back them up.
By early 2025, UK chief executive Alistair Macrow said 29 people had been fired in the previous year over sexual harassment allegations. The company had been alerted to 75 allegations across 12 months, 47 of which were upheld with disciplinary action, out of a UK workforce of more than 170,000. The country’s equality watchdog had received 300 reports of harassment since July 2023, and law firm Leigh Day was instructed to begin legal action by more than 700 current and former staff, all aged 19 or under when they worked there, with more than 450 restaurants named.
Macrow called the behavior abhorrent. Five trade unions and a campaign group had filed a complaint in 2024 with the UK’s OECD National Contact Point, part of the Department for Business and Trade, over the chain’s alleged failure to protect workers, and in January 2026 it offered mediation.
Pink slime was real, just not in the nuggets
A photo of a coiled pink paste spent years circulating online, labeled as a Chicken McNugget ingredient. McDonald’s denied it flatly and in 2014 put out a video showing what goes into the nuggets, white boneless chicken meat.
The reason the fake photo stuck is that a version of the story was true. In 2011, British chef Jamie Oliver showed on his television program that McDonald’s had used a pink slimy ingredient in its beef burgers: boneless lean beef trimmings, the leftovers after beef is cut for the meat industry, treated with ammonium hydroxide. McDonald’s confirmed in 2012 that it had already dropped ammonia-treated beef at the start of 2011, and denied Oliver had anything to do with it. The rumor has outlived the practice by more than a decade.
A lawsuit says the McRib has no rib meat in it
Four plaintiffs filed a federal class action in Illinois on December 23, 2025, alleging the McRib patty contains no actual pork rib meat despite being shaped to look like a rack of ribs. The complaint says the patty is reconstructed from ground lower-grade pork including shoulder, heart, tripe and scalded stomach, and argues shoppers assume a sandwich named McRib contains rib meat, which sells at a premium. They are seeking compensatory damages, restitution and an order stopping the advertising.
McDonald’s said the suit distorts the facts and that many of its claims are inaccurate, and that the McRib is made with 100% pork sourced from US farmers and suppliers. The company lists the McRib pork patty as pork, water, salt, dextrose and rosemary extract. The sandwich had returned to select restaurants in November 2025.
The ice cream machine got its own case. In 2022 Kytch, which makes a device that diagnoses breakdowns in McFlurry machines, sued McDonald’s for $900 million, alleging the chain spread false safety claims about its product to protect the repair business of the machines’ maker, Taylor.
The $18 Big Mac meal and the pricing software
By McDonald’s own count, menu prices are up about 40% since 2019. One Connecticut franchise got torched on social media for an $18 Big Mac meal, and a $3 hash brown did not help. McDonald’s USA president Joe Erlinger pointed to franchisees’ rising costs of running their restaurants. The chain answered the backlash in late June 2024 with a $5 Meal Deal as lower-income diners cut back on visits: a McDouble or McChicken, four-piece McNuggets, small fries and a drink.
Then came the pricing suit. On October 2, 2026, a proposed nationwide class action was filed in federal court in Chicago alleging McDonald’s coordinates menu prices across franchises and company-owned stores using an AI pricing engine. The plaintiff, Michael Thomas of DeKalb, Illinois, noticed his usual Quarter Pounder with cheese, fries and a Coke cost different amounts at nearby locations. A Reuters investigation days earlier found one company-run Fresno store selling a Big Mac for $5.69 while another two miles away charged $6.89. McDonald’s denied the allegations, said AI does not set menu prices and franchisees do, and called the complaint filled with inaccuracies.
Rats in Oakland, a closure, and child labor fines
The only McDonald’s in downtown Oakland shut its doors in late 2025. Workers said they learned of the closure days before Thanksgiving and were told they could not transfer to nearby stores. They walked out on strike on November 25, 2025. Maria Maldonado, an organizer with the California Fast Food Workers Union, said ten days was not enough time for those workers to find new jobs.
That same location had been temporarily shut in May 2024 by the Alameda County Department of Environmental Health after live and dead rats were found inside. A leaked video obtained by KRON4 News showed rats crawling through the restaurant, and employees said they had been threatened with firing if they recorded the problem. Franchise owner Joseph Wong said he contacted pest control as soon as he was told.
In April 2025, the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office filed citations against franchise operators of McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts and Subway over child labor laws, naming Cafua Management Company, The Brewster Company and Knight Food Service, Inc. Brewster, the McDonald’s operator, was fined $63,930 for scheduling minors during prohibited hours and past the state’s nine-hour daily limit at eight Massachusetts locations between May 2021 and May 2024.
Which one still lands hardest
The outbreak is the one with a death certificate attached, and it is the one most people will remember in ten years. The franchisee discrimination fight is the one that says the most about how the company treats the operators who built it.
But the cases piling up now are about money and labeling: what is in the sandwich, who decides the price, and whether the person at the register got a legal schedule. Those are the ones customers actually feel at the counter, and they are the ones that keep landing in Illinois federal court.
