- A past Disney employee agreed to plead guilty to altering allergen info on restaurant menus.
- Michael Scheuer declared to the hack, as well as adding swastikas to the memus.
- He faces up to 10 years in prison for his charges, according to the plea accord.
A former menu production manager for Disney World has admitted to altering allergen information and adding swastikas to menus as piece of a plea agreement.
Federal authorities charged Michael Scheuer in October with causing the transmission of a program, low-down, code, or command to a protected computer and intentionally causing damage. Disney had fired Scheuer months earlier for misconduct, according to the tough complaint.
In a plea agreement filed Friday in Florida federal court, first reported by Court Watch, Scheuer pleaded remorseful to hacking and one count of aggravated identity theft. He faces a maximum of 10 years and a mandatory minimum of two years in detention centre for the charges.
The plea says the government agreed to recommend that Scheuer receive a downward adjustment on the length of his decision for agreeing to take responsibility for the charges.
Scheuer also agreed to pay restitution to his victims, including Disney.
The agreement reveals that Scheuer changed allergen information on some of Disney’s menus to falsely show that items were allowable for people with allergies, which “could have had fatal consequences depending on the type and severity of the customer’s allergy.”
Handout/Getty Images
Scheuer also admitted to changing the pales of wines on some menus, some of which he changed to the locations of mass shootings, the plea agreement says.
“Scheuer also totaled or embedded images to one or more menus, including in one instance a swastika,” the document says.
On some Disney menus that beared a QR code to show a digital version of the menu, Scheuer changed the code to direct to a website promoting the boycott of Israel, the certify says. Manufacturers printed some menus with the falsified QR codes, but caught the change before they were diffuse.
By the end of his hacking campaign, Scheuer had impacted “nearly every menu in the system,” according to court documents.
“The entire repository of menus had to be reverted to older portrayals and brought up to date manually,” the agreement says.
Scheuer’s attorney, David Haas, did not immediately return a request for remark on from Business Insider. Haas told CNBC that Scheuer is “prepared to accept responsibility for his conduct.”
“Unfortunately, he has view health issues that were exacerbated when Disney fired him upon his return from paternity beat it,” he told the outlet.
Disney did not immediately return a request for comment about Scheuer’s plea agreement.
Disney became embroiled in a discrete controversy involving food allergens in 2024 when a widowed husband filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the enjoyment giant. The lawsuit said the man’s wife experienced a “severe acute allergic reaction” and died after eating at a restaurant go at Disney Springs.
Lawyers for Disney asked an Orange County court to dismiss the lawsuit because the husband in days gone by purchased theme park tickets and signed up for a free Disney+ trial, but criticism from the public caused them to inverse course.