NEWS: Former Cast Member Arrested After Hacking Disney and Changing Menus

Checking Disney World menus before you choose where to dine is often an important step in planning your vacation.

Disney offers online and in-person menus for all its quick service and table service restaurants, so it makes it easy to look at your options ahead of time. And if you’re a person with allergies, you can often see alternate menu items listed online or ask at the restaurant. But what would happen if the Disney World menus were WRONG?

The Orlando Sentinel reports that a Disney World employee fired in June has now been arrested for hacking into menu-creation software used by the company’s restaurants and changing menus. When changing the menus, Michael Scheuer falsely updated some of them to claim that items were peanut-free when in fact, they were not.

Scheuer was a menu production manager for Disney before being fired in June for misconduct. According to a criminal complaint filed, the firing was contentious. Scheuer was arrested on October 23rd following an FBI investigation that concurred he’d breached Disney’s software several times in the past few months.

The complaint charges Scheuer with fraudulent activity connected with computers, and he now has a bond hearing scheduled for Tuesday. The complaint doesn’t mention Disney by name, but Scheuer’s lawyer, David Haas, has shared that Scheuer was employed there. Haas claims that Scheuer has a disability that impacted his termination.

In addition to changing allergen information, the complaint said that Scheuer changed prices, added profanity, and replaced fonts in the menu software. He also altered QR codes on menus to redirect to a website listing names of Israeli companies for boycotting purposes. These actions are expected to have caused at least $150,000 in damages.

Scheuer also locked 14 Disney employees, including former coworkers, out of their company accounts and collected personal data on 4 of those individuals.