FAFO: Fired Disney World Manager Gets Three Years Jail For Monkeying With Park Menu Boards

May 9, 2025 by Dave Haynes

In a clear example of F*** Around and Find Out, a former Walt Disney World employee who responded to his firing by using his unrevoked system access to monkey with and disable the park’s digital menus has been handed a three-year prison sentence and ordered to pay almost $700,000 USD in restitution.

While that, at first blush, looks a bit severe, among the actions taken was revising allergen information for menu items – making some peanut-containing items appear safe, which could have been life-threatening to people with specific allergies.

Michael Scheuer, 41, was sentenced recently to 36 months in prison and ordered to pay $687,776 in restitution, about $620,000 going to Disney and $70,000 to a third-party software provider for the Menu Creator system (not sure who, despite some Googling).

Scheuer was the park’s menu production manager when he was fired by Disney for misconduct last June. But his access to the system was not revoked on termination, and the court reported he used available access to start attacking the company’s proprietary Menu Creator software in July. Court reporting suggests he had access for at least three months.

“These intrusions included manipulating allergen information in restaurant menus to indicate that food items were safe for customers with certain allergies, when they were not,” according to court filings. “Scheuer also altered menu information related to wine regions to reflect locations of recent mass shootings.”

The alterations were detected before they reached customers’ hands.

Scheuer also launched denial-of-service (DoS) attacks on some 14 Disney colleagues, effectively locking them out of their accounts.

This NBC News story has more detail …