- A former Disney employee agreed to plead guilty to altering allergen info on restaurant menus.
- Michael Scheuer admitted 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 agreement.
A former menu production manager for Disney World has admitted to altering allergen information and adding swastikas to menus as part of a plea agreement.
Federal authorities charged Michael Scheuer in October with causing the transmission of a program, information, code, or command to a protected computer and intentionally causing damage. Disney had fired Scheuer months earlier for misconduct, according to the criminal complaint.
In a plea agreement filed Friday in Florida federal court, first reported by Court Watch, Scheuer pleaded guilty to hacking and one count of aggravated identity theft. He faces a maximum of 10 years and a mandatory minimum of two years in prison for the charges.
The plea says the government agreed to recommend that Scheuer receive a downward adjustment on the length of his sentence for agreeing to take responsibility for the charges.
Scheuer also agreed to pay restitution to his victims, including Disney.
The agreement says that Scheuer changed allergen information on some of Disney’s menus to falsely show that items were safe 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 regions of wines on some menus, some of which he changed to the locations of mass shootings, the plea agreement says.
“Scheuer also added or embedded images to one or more menus, including in one instance a swastika,” the document says.
On some Disney menus that contained 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 document says. Manufacturers printed some menus with the falsified QR codes, but caught the change before they were distributed.
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 versions and brought up to date manually,” the agreement says.
Scheuer’s attorney, David Haas, did not immediately return a request for comment from Business Insider. Haas told CNBC that Scheuer is “prepared to accept responsibility for his conduct.”
“Unfortunately, he has mental health issues that were exacerbated when Disney fired him upon his return from paternity leave,” he told the outlet.
Disney did not immediately return a request for comment about Scheuer’s plea agreement.
Disney became embroiled in a separate controversy involving food allergens in 2024 when a widowed husband filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against the entertainment giant. The lawsuit said the man’s wife experienced a “severe acute allergic reaction” and died after eating at a restaurant operated at Disney Springs.
Lawyers for Disney asked an Orange County court to dismiss the lawsuit because the husband previously purchased theme park tickets and signed up for a free Disney+ trial, but criticism from the public caused them to reverse course.
