A former Disney employee has pleaded guilty to altering menus at Walt Disney World restaurants to hide information about potentially deadly allergens like peanuts, according to CNBC.
Authorities also allege that after Michael Scheuer was fired last summer as the park’s menu production manager, he hacked into third-party menu creation software used by Disney. Authorities further allege that he altered prices, added a swastika to one menu, and replaced the geographical regions of selected wines with areas that had recently experienced mass shootings.
Scheuer entered a guilty plea on Friday, where he admitted to computer fraud and aggravated identity theft in connection to the hacking.
As part of the plea agreement, he has agreed to pay restitution to Disney as well as a fine. He also gave up a computer tower he allegedly used in the hack, according to Court Watch.
Scheuer was fired last June for misconduct, and the FBI says he then hacked the computer system used to create the menus, and made various changes over a three-month period.
He was arrested in October, after company officials “noticed that all of the fonts in the application had been replaced by fonts that depicted symbols, also known as wingdings,” according to a criminal complaint.
Federal agents then seized Scheuer’s computers, although he denied wrongdoing, telling investigators he was being framed by Disney “because they were worried about him and the conditions under which he was terminated,” according to WFTV.
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Scheuer’s attorney, David Haas, told CNBC that his client was fired for objecting to recent changes in how the menus were created.
He blamed Scheuer’s actions after the dismissal on “mental health issues that were exacerbated when Disney fired him upon his return from paternity leave.”
Scheuer faces up to 12 years in prison and $500,000 in fines, but both the time behind bars and the amount of the fine will depend on how much monetary loss Disney is determined to have experienced.