Major Fraud Or Major Injustice - The Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Scandal

As I'm sure you all know by now, last night marked the return of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? to prime time television. As a kid, I used to love game shows and I was a huge fan of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire way back when it first premiered and hell, even now I still like the show and am planning on watching all of the anniversary specials. I guess it was last year I was watching some old YouTube videos of Millionaire and some of the winners and subsequently some of the bozos who made complete fools of themselves in front of millions of people when I clicked on a video entitled, "Who Wants To Be A Millionaire - Major Fraud"

Seeing as at the time I had never heard of such a thing, the video sparked my interest, and when I clicked on it, my curiousity was immediately sparked when I found out that I had clicked on the first part of a documentary about someone who had cheated on the British Edition of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Not only that, but the guy who cheated was a former Major in the British Army. Now there is some controversy over this whole matter. The Major was convicted of cheating and served his jail sentence (the incident occured in 2001), although to this day he maintains his innocence and everyone that was alleged to be "in on it" has not confessed and/or admitted to being involved in this scandal. The documentary, which I have posted below in its entirety, is shaped soley from the point of view of the Major cheated and even though they were offered, no one proclaiming innocence participated in or was interviewed in this documentary. Below the documentary, you will find a very long essay written by a 3rd party analyzing why the British Major could NOT have cheated and instead won the money fair and square (by long, I mean 37 multi-paragraph points, if you think I'm long-winded, check this out). Anyway, if this is your cup of tea and you have a good hour or 2 (the documentary over an hour long and the essay may take you a good 30 minutes to an hour to get through, depending on how fast you read), I highly recommend you check this out as it truly is a fascinating story. The documentary, as you will soon discover, consists of multiple YouTube videos, all of which are listed below. Enjoy!










Incidentally, it is in part this scandal that inspired the movie Slumdog Millionaire (love that movie, btw). In the novel that the movie was based on, no real, specific quiz/game show was ever mentioned, and the makers of Slumdog Millionaire figured that if a British Army Major can cheat his way to the top, then why can't someone from the slums win it cleanly? And even though I have not read the book of which the movie is based, I'm sure it is no coincidence that the main character was accused of cheating in the movie.

And as promised, here is the long essay written by James Plaskett, a 3rd party not involved in the incident, in 2004 defending the Major's innocence. Enjoy!

I hope you enjoyed that whether you saw and read this now or were bored somewhere further along down the road and saw it then. And if you're interested, from the same person who posted the Major Fraud documentary, here is a link to the start of a program which starts out as a documentary further explaining what the original plan was (as the Major Fraud documentary is a bit unclear on how Plan A was supposed to unfold) and then goes into an unedited re-broadcast of the proceedings. I trust that you'll be able to navigate your way around the videos.