After losing his job, an ex-Disney employee tried to get his former employer's attention by hacking in and making strange updates to company files.Sources:https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69534211/united-states-v-scheuer/https://www.eeoc.gov/what-you-can-expect-after-you-file-chargehttps://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/26/us/disney-worker-prison-hacking.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| This is an iHeart Podcast. | |
| It's April 2020. | |
| A woman announces on Facebook that she has COVID and won't be seeking medical attention. | |
| I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. | |
| Then she disappears. | |
| Uh, anyone else think this is strange? | |
| I just had to know. | |
| How did this happen? | |
| Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Music Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. | |
| He's just straight evil. | |
| I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. | |
| At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. | |
| Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. | |
| The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. | |
| Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death. | |
| Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. | |
| Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia. | |
| Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Call Zone Media In June of 2024, Michael Scheuer had a disagreement with a co-worker. | |
| It isn't clear from the court records. | |
| So I couldn't tell you exactly what was said. | |
| He says there was a difference of opinion over a workplace matter. | |
| But he's in federal prison, and two of his co-workers now have restraining orders against him, so I'm inclined to believe there may be more to the story than that. | |
| But that's all we know. | |
| That minor workplace disagreement ruined Michael Scheuer's life. | |
| Losing his job was not only financially devastating, It was the death of his lifelong dream of working for the Walt Disney Corporation. | |
| And losing a job is never easy. | |
| It's a crushing blow. | |
| You have to figure out how you're going to pay the rent, how you're going to get health care, how you're going to find a new job. | |
| I can't speak for everybody, but I think I'm not alone in saying that it's also embarrassing. | |
| It hurts your feelings. | |
| Your ego takes a real hit. | |
| And for some people, that just isn't something they can move on from. | |
| I'm Molly Conger, and this is Weird Little Guys. | |
| Weird Little Guys This is kind of a silly one. | |
| Nobody gets hurt. | |
| Nobody dies. | |
| Nothing really bad actually happened. | |
| I know I said last week that I ended up with the episode that came out because I was reaching around for something quick. | |
| Because the story I was trying to write just felt unwieldy and I was having trouble forcing it into the right shape. | |
| Well, that's where we still are this week. | |
| I'm still really fighting with something I think is going to take a few more weeks to hammer out into any kind of actual narrative, so here we are again at the 11th hour, and I have nothing but a few dozen pages of odds and ends about a story that spans 50 years. | |
| And so I'm scrounging around for something else. | |
| I'm not asking for your sympathy or anything. | |
| You probably have a real job where you make something or help people. | |
| And my job is just telling you a horrible little story. | |
| But all I can tell you is the truth, and the truth is, sometimes I have no idea how I'm going to force any more words out of my brain and into this microphone. | |
| So all I've got this week is Michael Scheuer. | |
| And like I said, he didn't really hurt anybody. | |
| He wasn't a member of any hate groups, as far as I can tell. | |
| Until last summer, he had no history of any criminal conduct. | |
| I couldn't find so much as a speeding ticket. | |
| He was squeaky clean. | |
| He was a family man, married for nearly 10 years and the father of three young children. | |
| But the course of action he decided on after he got fired last summer is what makes him a weird little guy. | |
| And I think he's actually a tiny example of one of the emerging weird little guy archetypes. | |
| I don't have a name for it yet. | |
| I don't really have the weird little guy taxonomy mapped out, but patterns are starting to appear in these stories. | |
| There are distinct types of weird little guy, and one of them is a kind of guy who can't accept when he's wrong. | |
| More importantly, he can't accept being wronged. | |
| And God help you if you have even a passing encounter with this kind of guy. | |
| For some of them, the perceived slight is so minor that it's not something I think I would ever think about again, let alone devote the rest of my life to getting revenge over it. | |
| If you've listened to the whole catalog of this show, you've heard about some of these guys. | |
| I'm thinking about people like Frank Sweeney from the pair of episodes back in September. | |
| Frank was a lifelong neo-Nazi, sure. | |
| But mostly he was a con man. | |
| He ended up in prison a couple of times for little frauds and cons, things like putting ads in gun magazines for fancy guns that he didn't actually own, and then accepting numerous buyers' money for these imaginary collector's items. | |
| Later in his life, he cut the tails off of stray cats and sold them to gullible people who thought they were buying fancy, purebred, tailless cats. | |
| He conned the FBI, the CIA, the DOJ, and the Witness Protection Program into thinking that he was helping them to apprehend an escaped Soviet spy that he'd befriended in prison. | |
| He once tricked a mob lawyer into flying him across the country and putting him up in a nice hotel in exchange for testimony about a Chicago mob boss he'd once shared a cell with. | |
| He loved to lie. | |
| But more than that, I think the defining characteristic of a guy like Frank Sweeney is his sense of self-righteous indignation. | |
| here. | |
| To hurt them back the way they'd hurt him. | |
| And he did it in some really bizarre ways. | |
| In the early 90s, when he was living in an apartment in New Jersey, a family with children moved into a neighboring apartment. | |
| And once he decided that the neighbors were intentionally disregarding his request to keep their children quiet, he made it his life's mission to destroy the entire family. | |
| He spread rumors that the father had HIV and that he'd given it to his children. | |
| He shut off their power at random. | |
| He filled the lock on their front door with staples so they couldn't get into their home. | |
| He had their mail routed to a random address in Iowa. | |
| And he subscribed their nine-year-old son to pornographic magazines. | |
| And that's unhinged behavior. | |
| That is an unnecessary escalation to the problem of a noisy fourth grader. | |
| And it was all because he felt entitled to complete silence in his apartment and total obedience. | |
| And two decades after that, when he was already a very old man, a stranger made a passing comment about how he'd parked his car at the post office parking lot. | |
| And instead of just letting it go, like almost anyone else on earth would, he spent three years stalking that woman and her entire family, sending them threatening postcards, Spreading rumors that they'd engaged in sexually deviant behavior, that they were drug addicts and criminals and they were doing tax fraud. | |
| Three years. | |
| Because she commented on how he had parked his car. | |
| And then there was Walter Fitzpatrick from those episodes back in November. | |
| He was the sovereign citizen who tried to citizens arrest an entire courthouse in rural Tennessee because they wouldn't help him indict President Barack Obama. | |
| For treason. | |
| And Walter Fitzpatrick had a long history of this kind of grievance-motivated behavior. | |
| He'd been banned from his congressman's office after the receptionist had to get a restraining order against him because he refused to accept that they just couldn't help him get a new trial in his Navy court-martial. | |
| And then there are the weird little guys who try to use the courts to get their revenge. | |
| Becoming vexatious litigants filing lawsuit after lawsuit against anyone who says no to them. | |
| Guys like Robert Mahler from a few weeks ago, the one-time arms dealer who shipped hundreds of guns to neo-Nazis in South Africa. | |
| In his quieter, older years, he seems to work out his anger by filing a constant stream of nuisance lawsuits. | |
| He filed a lawsuit against the hospital that didn't perform his elective surgery at the exact time they'd scheduled it for. | |
| Lawsuits against the guys from the table tennis club who asked him to stop coming around because his behavior was frightening. | |
| A lawsuit against the state because he didn't think it was fair that he got a traffic ticket. | |
| A lawsuit against a restaurant for asking him not to let his dog touch the food on the buffet. | |
| Like I said, I'm still working on the taxonomy here. | |
| But I think these are all, to some degree, the same kind of guy. | |
| The common denominator is that they can't handle discomfort. | |
| They can't handle someone telling them no. | |
| They can't handle being wrong. | |
| They can't handle not being the protagonist of reality. | |
| This is their story, and we're just the characters in it. | |
| We're supposed to behave the way he wants us to. | |
| And if we don't? | |
| His reaction is not going to be normal. | |
| And that's the mold that I think Michael Scheuer fits into. | |
| He isn't, all things considered, really the kind of guy I'm interested in. | |
| This isn't the kind of story I would normally choose for an episode of this show. | |
| Because, like I said, he wasn't in any kind of hate group, and he didn't hurt anybody. | |
| But I am interested in this kind of guy, the kind of guy whose reaction to a But | |
| I guess we should start at the beginning. | |
| Loved Disney. | |
| It had always been his dream to work for the company. | |
| After graduating from Kent State in Ohio, he moved to Orlando to try to get his foot in the door. | |
| He started as a janitor and worked his way up. | |
| And on this front, I guess you do have to hand it to him. | |
| It looks like he did the work. | |
| He had a dream, and he did the work to try to make it come true. | |
| He had a college degree. | |
| But he was willing to take an entry-level job, picking up trash at a theme park, if that's what it took, to be close to Mickey Mouse. | |
| He continued working at Disney while he earned his business degree, and slowly but surely, he worked his way up from groundskeeper to cast member, and eventually got an office job at Disney. | |
| By 2018, he was working as a financial systems analyst. | |
| When COVID hit, His job was one of many that were cut by the company. | |
| And he spent the year that he was laid off trying anything he could to get back in. | |
| And he was eventually rehired as part of the team doing technical support for computers installed on Disney cruise ships. | |
| And in 2024, he was working on the team tasked with designing and updating the menus and menu signs used at Disney theme parks and resorts. | |
| Michael Scheuer's wife gave birth to their third child. | |
| I don't know if Michael Scheuer took advantage of the full eight weeks of paternity leave that Disney claims to offer, but I do know that he took paternity leave. | |
| Because it was just a few days after returning from that leave in June of 2024 that the incident took place. | |
| What exactly happened is in dispute. | |
| According to his defense attorney, His version of events is this. | |
| Shortly after returning to work, Mr. Scheuer voiced a difference of opinion to his supervisor about a new process of menu creation. | |
| He believed his team agreed with him, but his supervisor did not. | |
| He met with his supervisor and a disagreement occurred. | |
| Mr. Scheuer had a panic attack during the meeting. | |
| The next supervisor up the chain of command stated to Mr. Scheuer that he did not threaten his supervisor, but that Mr. Scheuer was going to be suspended. | |
| A sworn statement from the supervisor in question, though, reads, In June 2024, Michael Scheuer was terminated from employment due to misconduct against me, in which he threatened me at work. | |
| And the government was prepared to present a witness who would testify that his behavior had been aggressive and threatening. | |
| In the meeting that led to his termination. | |
| And maybe that comes down to semantics. | |
| Maybe she perceived his conduct as threatening without him actually making a direct threat. | |
| That is technically different in the eyes of the law, but I think any reasonable person can understand that if you make your supervisor feel like she is in danger, you might get fired. | |
| Music It's the early days of COVID. | |
| April 2020. | |
| A woman in a small town in Oklahoma makes a strange post to Facebook and then disappears. | |
| I'm on day nine of this virus and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs. | |
| I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital. | |
| Pretty quickly, a ragtag group of women on the internet Start their own investigation. | |
| It felt like I was living out one of my fantasy dreams of being a detective. | |
| But the world they uncover is beyond their wildest imagination. | |
| How did this happen? | |
| Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| *music* | |
| Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. | |
| Long, silent voices from his past came forward. | |
| And he was just staring at me. | |
| And they had secrets of their own to share. | |
| Gilbert came. | |
| I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. | |
| I was no longer just telling the story. | |
| I was part of it. | |
| Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. | |
| He's just straight evil. | |
| I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. | |
| If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. | |
| I would have never existed. | |
| I never expected to find myself in this place. | |
| Now, I need to tell you how I got here. | |
| At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. | |
| Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy. | |
| Jeremy, I want to tell you something. | |
| Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. | |
| Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Frey and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. | |
| The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. | |
| Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death. | |
| Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies, and a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one. | |
| Some highwaymen were well-mannered or faked it. | |
| People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs. | |
| Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. | |
| Call them robbers or bandits, some are legendary figures. | |
| Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each. | |
| Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Music He was initially just sent home and suspended. | |
| But after he sent an email to Human Resources described only as, quote, 24 questions pertaining to the suspension, which I'm sure had a very normal tone, the decision was made to terminate his employment with Disney. | |
| And this is the point at which he crossed the weird little guy Rubicon. | |
| He was upset. | |
| It wasn't fair. | |
| This was his dream. | |
| He loved Disney. | |
| He loved working for Disney and he needed that job. | |
| He needed the health insurance. | |
| He had a family to take care of for God's sake. | |
| They just didn't understand. | |
| If they would have heard him out, they would understand that they were wrong to fire him. | |
| But they wouldn't take his calls. | |
| He claims that he was unable to find an employment lawyer willing to take his case. | |
| He says he, quote, Filed a complaint with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but did not get a quick response. | |
| He felt isolated and depressed. | |
| He did not understand why nobody would speak with him. | |
| And this is the explanation his attorney offered for what happened next. | |
| Quote, I'm not an expert in employment law. | |
| But I did look up how long it usually takes to get a response from the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission if you file a complaint online. | |
| The law says they have 10 days to send notice of the complaint to your former employer. | |
| And then once they do that, the employer has 30 days from that date to respond to it. | |
| The average complaint takes about 10 months to resolve, start to finish. | |
| But he didn't even wait 30 days before he decided to change tactics. | |
| He started trying to get Disney's attention his own way less than three weeks after he was fired. | |
| And so you might be thinking, oh, he probably sent some weird emails to his former co-workers, right? | |
| Maybe he started showing up outside the office or making a lot of phone calls. | |
| And those are all reasonable guesses. | |
| Those are things you might do if your stated goal was to get someone's attention. | |
| No, what he decided to do is much weirder. | |
| And honestly, I don't understand why he thinks we would believe his claim that this was the only thing he could think of that would get them to call him. | |
| Again from his lawyer, quote, And respond to him. | |
| Now remember, that was his job before he was fired. | |
| He worked on the team responsible for designing, editing, and updating the files used to print the menus at restaurants and cafes at Disney parks and hotels. | |
| Once the files were approved by the team at Disney, the physical menus were printed by a Minnesota-based print and marketing company called Taylor Corporation. | |
| Just a few weeks after being fired, Scheuer logged into the online application used by the print company to manage the menu files. | |
| A lot of the news coverage about this case refers to what he did as hacking in, which I didn't realize is technically the correct word for what happened. | |
| Hacking doesn't necessarily require any particular set of skills or, you know, it's not like a 90s movie where they're tippy tapping on the keyboard as all the numbers flash on the screen. | |
| No, it just means... | |
| And he definitely was not authorized to be logging in. | |
| But the company had actually just forgotten to change the password to the administrative account. | |
| And once he logged into that administrator's account, he created a new employee profile for himself using a fake name. | |
| And then using that account with the fake name, he logged in and he went to town. | |
| He replaced all of the font files for all of the menus in the system. | |
| And this sounds like hell. | |
| He didn't just change the fonts that were used in the text of the menus. | |
| He changed the source files for all of the fonts in every menu. | |
| So all of the names of the fonts still appeared to be correct, but those names were now connected to a corresponding file for a different font. | |
| And he'd changed most of those fonts to Wingdings, the font that's just weird little symbols. | |
| And because he'd altered the font files themselves, the system then started pushing out this change to every single one of the thousands of files ever uploaded to this system. | |
| And this rendered the entire application completely useless for at least a week. | |
| And so because this took the entire system offline and rendered every single file useless, obviously they noticed this immediately. | |
| Disney pretty quickly tracked down the source of the problem, and they changed all the passwords so this couldn't happen again. | |
| But that didn't really stop him. | |
| So now that One Avenue had been closed off, He just moved to a different strategy. | |
| If he couldn't log in, he would make sure no one else could either. | |
| He started small, targeting those immediate supervisors, the ones who'd fired him, and he used their login names and entered random incorrect passwords, making these repeated bad attempts to access the system, which would then trigger the accounts to be locked out. | |
| At first, he was just doing this manually. | |
| So you have to imagine him sitting alone at his computer while his chronically ill wife is trying to take care of their three young children, one of whom is a newborn baby, and he's just sitting there at his computer again and again and again typing in a random keyboard smash password and hitting enter over and over and over again so that his old boss can't access her email? | |
| Throughout August and September of 2024, these attacks escalated. | |
| And he eventually wrote a script to automate the process of making these thousands and thousands of login attempts. | |
| On one day alone, he made 8,000 login attempts across accounts belonging to the four people that he thought were responsible for firing him. | |
| And he eventually branched out to 14 different accounts, all of which belonged to members of the team he'd worked on before he was fired. | |
| Over the course of about a month, He made 100,000 login attempts, blocking these employees out of their accounts for days at a time. | |
| And around the same time he's ramping up these attacks on his former co-workers' accounts, he found a new way to mess with the menus. | |
| Disney had changed all of the passwords, so he couldn't access the application that was used by the Disney production team anymore. | |
| But the company that actually prints the finished menu files had their own system. | |
| All finished menu files had to be uploaded to the print company through a secure file transfer protocol. | |
| So he made his own menu files and uploaded them directly to the printer. | |
| His initial attempt to get Disney's attention had made the menus unusable. | |
| They had nonsense fonts, they wouldn't load the image files, or they just came up as blank pages. | |
| So everyone noticed this. | |
| This was a very obvious attempt. | |
| But this time around, he was a lot more subtle. | |
| If you're just looking quickly at these files, you wouldn't notice there was anything wrong. | |
| Honestly, they might have even made it all the way through a proofreading process if you weren't being really meticulous. | |
| Because he's just changing individual words. | |
| He's changing the prices by a dollar or two. | |
| Little changes. | |
| Almost like maybe he didn't want them to notice this time. | |
| And honestly, some of them are kind of funny. | |
| I mean, overall, yes, this is a bad situation. | |
| He should not have done any of this. | |
| But if he just stuck with immature little jokes, the whole story would have a really different tone. | |
| Because it's hard to be mad about stuff like changing cheesy grits to... | |
| Cheesy shits on the menu for a cafe at Disney's Old Key West Resort, or changing shellfish to hellfish, or changing the description of an English breakfast tea from Assam tea to just ass tea. | |
| That's a little bit funny. | |
| I'm not mad imagining an old couple in Key West seeing cheesy shits on their menu. | |
| But unfortunately, most of the changes were not funny swear words. | |
| Most of the changes were modifications to the allergen information on menu items across multiple dining locations, removing alerts on menu items that contained potentially fatal food allergens, like peanuts. | |
| On other menus, he altered the region listed for wine selections. | |
| That one sounds mostly harmless to me. | |
| I'm not a wine snob, so I don't really care where the grapes were grown. | |
| I'm not going to pretend I can taste the difference. | |
| But he swapped out the actual locations for places where well-known mass shootings have occurred. | |
| In one case, the shooting had been painfully recent. | |
| He swapped out Willamette Valley on one wine for Apalachee High, an unmistakable reference to a school shooting in Georgia that had only just happened the week that he did that. | |
| On another menu, he uploaded a small image of a swastika. | |
| It's the early days of COVID. | |
| April 2020. | |
| A woman in a small town in Oklahoma makes a strange post to Facebook and then disappears. | |
| I'm on day nine of this virus and I am pretty sure it has reached my lungs. | |
| I made the decision at the onset that if it got bad enough, I would not go to the hospital. | |
| Pretty quickly, a ragtag group of women on the internet Start their own investigation. | |
| It felt like I was living out one of my fantasy dreams of being a detective. | |
| But the world they uncover is beyond their wildest imagination. | |
| How did this happen? | |
| Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. I just knew him as a kid. | |
| Long, silent voices from his past came forward. | |
| And he was just staring at me. | |
| And they had secrets of their own to share. | |
| Gilbert King. | |
| I'm the son of Jeremy Lynn Scott. | |
| I was no longer just telling the story. | |
| I was part of it. | |
| Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. | |
| He's just straight evil. | |
| I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known. | |
| If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. | |
| I would have never existed. | |
| I never expected to find myself in this place. | |
| Now, I need to tell you how I got here. | |
| At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. | |
| Bone Valley, Season 2. Jeremy. | |
| Jeremy, I want to tell you something. | |
| Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts. | |
| Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Frey and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. | |
| The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. | |
| Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death. | |
| Hear the story of the gentleman robber, the romantic darling of the ladies, and a tale about a wager over a sack of potatoes, but you'll have to tune in to learn who won that one. | |
| Some highwaymen were well-mannered or faked it. | |
| People were concerned about the romanticism of robbers, but most were just thugs. | |
| Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. | |
| Call them robbers or bandits, some are legendary figures. | |
| Listen to stories about historical crimes on Criminalia now, plus the cocktails and mocktails inspired by each. | |
| Listen to Criminalia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| *Music* | |
| He would later claim that he never actually intended for any of these altered files to get printed. | |
| He said that he knew Disney employees reviewed every file and that they would catch the alterations before they went to the printer. | |
| He wasn't actually trying to poison any children with peanut allergies. | |
| He just wanted Disney to call him. | |
| He didn't want these menus to end up in anyone's hands. | |
| He just wanted attention. | |
| But that claim... | |
| Falls apart by the time he switched to a new mode of attack. | |
| He uploaded altered files directly into the server that functioned as the print queue for the company that printed the menus. | |
| So by that point in the process, the printer is receiving what they believe to be a file that has been proofed and approved and is ready to print. | |
| And they did in fact print thousands of these altered menus and signs. | |
| Although by the time they did print these, the investigation was coming to an end and the affected items were destroyed before they were shipped out. | |
| And he wasn't hard to catch. | |
| Immediately after the initial unauthorized access was detected, Disney launched an internal investigation. | |
| Multiple employees interviewed during this process brought up the fact that Michael Scheuer had just been fired. | |
| Further investigation showed the attacks had all been made by someone using a VPN to mask their IP address. | |
| But when they looked further back in the company logs, they found that before he was fired, Michael Scheuer had accessed his work email from home. | |
| And when he did that, he had his VPN on. | |
| So he managed to mask the true IP address of his home computer. | |
| But because he used the same VPN throughout, he was still using an IP address that was provably connected to him. | |
| On September 23rd, 2024, multiple members of the menu production team were locked out of their accounts. | |
| Again, someone was making hundreds and hundreds of attempts to access their accounts using incorrect passwords. | |
| At 12.41pm that afternoon, FBI agents knocked on Michael Scheuer's front door. | |
| They had a warrant to search his home and seize his computers. | |
| At 12.46 p.m., the wave of login attempts suddenly stopped, and it never started again. | |
| Two minutes after that, Michael Scheuer answered his front door. | |
| He claimed he was surprised to see the FBI there. | |
| But he made a strange comment that he wouldn't have been surprised if it was the local sheriff there to tell him to stop sending emails that might be interpreted as threatening. | |
| I have no idea what that means. | |
| That never comes up again. | |
| He told the FBI agents that, sure, he definitely used his home computer to access systems related to his job when he still worked there, Get his old pay stubs, things like that, but he couldn't think of any reason why they'd be there asking him questions like that. | |
| And when they explained to him why they were there and what they were investigating, he outright denied having done anything of the sort. | |
| And then he speculated that maybe Disney was framing him because they were worried about him. | |
| The FBI took his computers with him that day, but they didn't make an arrest. | |
| A few days later, Michael Scheuer hired an attorney and checked himself into an inpatient mental health facility. | |
| Meanwhile, the FBI was still building their case against him, including getting a search warrant for his Google account. | |
| Then, on October 22, 2024, a month after they searched his house, Michael Scheuer received an automated notice from Google that they'd been served with a warrant for his account. | |
| And they would be complying with the order to turn over his account information. | |
| Now I imagine that's a really scary email to get. | |
| I'm not sure what my initial reaction would be in that situation. | |
| The right answer, if this happens to you, is to call a lawyer. | |
| The extremely wrong answer is to then type, please explain this to me. | |
| at the top of the email and then forward that email to the FBI agent who was just at your house and then follow that up with another email the next day demanding that the agent loop in the victim of the crime on the conversation so you can get some answers about what's going on here. | |
| Perhaps an even worse course of action in this situation would be to then drive to your former boss's house in the middle of the night and stand on his front porch making a thumbs up at his security camera and then just walking away. | |
| It's hard to say what you would do in a stressful situation that you have never experienced before. | |
| I don't want a Monday morning quarterback here. | |
| I like to think that I would just call a lawyer. | |
| I don't think that I would do all that other stuff. | |
| But that is what Michael Scheuer did. | |
| The day after he paid that ominous visit to his former supervisor, the FBI wrote up and filed the criminal complaint. | |
| Whatever timeline they'd had in mind was irrelevant now. | |
| This guy was behaving unpredictably, and they needed to go ahead and make the arrest. | |
| Probably in large part because he made that strange nighttime visit to his former boss's house, and then the subsequent restraining orders granted to two of his former supervisors, he was held without bond. | |
| After two months in jail, he entered a plea agreement. | |
| He pled guilty to computer hacking and identity theft, and was sentenced to 36 months in prison. | |
| During the three-year period of supervised release after he gets out, he's not allowed to have any contact with any of his victims. | |
| So that's those 14 co-workers and the Disney Corporation. | |
| In the grand scheme of weird little guys, this is all pretty minor. | |
| Nobody really got hurt. | |
| It cost about $150,000 to reprint the affected materials and Disney estimates that the ordeal cost them about $600,000 in total. | |
| If the alterations hadn't been caught and those menus had been sent out to the restaurants, someone could have gotten seriously hurt. | |
| But they didn't. | |
| And according to Michael Scheuer, he knew they wouldn't. | |
| I don't know that that's true. | |
| It's impossible to say at this point. | |
| But again, in the end, nothing really happened, did it? | |
| I initially came across this case during my regular search for newly filed cases containing certain keywords I like to look for. | |
| I think in this case it was the word swastika, but I don't actually really think that this guy's a Nazi. | |
| I don't have any other evidence that points to that swastika being a larger part of his life. | |
| When the FBI came and took his computer away, there was a file on his desktop called swastika.com. | |
| Swastika.png. | |
| He must have googled the word swastika and then saved the image that he wanted to use on the menu. | |
| It kind of reminds me of early 4chan culture. | |
| I don't mean the 4chan of today. | |
| I mean, way back in the day, before those guys were genuinely sincere neo-Nazis and mass murder enthusiasts, a lot of them were just shit-talking. | |
| They wanted to be extreme. | |
| They wanted to be edgy. | |
| They wanted to post the most shocking, fucked up stuff they could think of because that was funny or thrilling or interesting, I guess. | |
| So I'm inclined to believe he put the swastika on the menu because it was the worst thing he could think of. | |
| Not because he actually liked it. | |
| I mean, I hope that's the case. | |
| I'm a little less generous when it comes to the mass shooting thing, though. | |
| That's odd to me. | |
| That feels like a manifestation of some nascent interest. | |
| I don't know that that's something that would come immediately to mind if you're just trolling and you have no existing preoccupation with mass shootings, you know? | |
| But that's just my gut. | |
| There's no evidence of anything at all about his motivations. | |
| This is the only thing he ever did. | |
| He crashed out at work, and it sent him into a tailspin that ended in federal prison. | |
| The only glimpse into Michael Scheuer's motivation that I can offer you is this Reddit post he made just a few days before the FBI showed up at his house for the first time. | |
| On a subreddit for people with social anxiety, he made a post with the title Reaching the End? | |
| It's long, but it reads in part The people involved in firing me treated me like a criminal. | |
| Me, who is afraid of everyone and just wants to blend into the background. | |
| I was blown away how absolutely nobody cared about me. | |
| Not one person from work reached out to check on me. | |
| I'm sure part of the reason is because I'm a man and everyone just assumed I don't need anyone. | |
| Maybe the other part is because I'm an awkward asshole. | |
| I have no friends. | |
| No work connections. | |
| Nothing. | |
| I've already determined I will never work again. | |
| Nobody cares about me. | |
| He goes on to say that he started therapy earlier that year, but when he got fired, he realized it was too late. | |
| Too late for what is unclear. | |
| Too late to change. | |
| Too late to make anything of his life. | |
| It has a vaguely suicidal tone, but he doesn't actually express a desire to harm himself. | |
| On the contrary, he seems fixated on harming others, writing, quote, Every day since I was fired, I sit around fuming, planning revenge because I feel so wronged. | |
| But then I remember, maybe they aren't the problem. | |
| Maybe it's me. | |
| I've always been afraid of everybody, but it's everybody that's been afraid of me. | |
| And there it is, isn't it? | |
| He said it himself. | |
| Because I feel so wronged. | |
| It's remarkably self-aware. | |
| It reminds me a lot of what Frank Sweeney said when the cops finally searched his house and discovered he'd been the one sending those threatening postcards all those years. | |
| He just admitted it. | |
| He said that woman in the parking lot had made him feel embarrassed. | |
| And it made him feel better to know that he was causing her distress in return. | |
| Being a weird little guy is something that exists on a spectrum, I think. | |
| Some of them are truly monsters. | |
| They kill, maim, torture, and terrorize. | |
| They carry out mass shootings and blow up synagogues and daycares. | |
| They're trying to start a race war. | |
| They want to barricade themselves on a compound and shoot it out with the police. | |
| They just want to gain enough political power to punish their enemies. | |
| Those are the guys I was thinking about when I started the show. | |
| But there are weird little guys out there who are much, much littler. | |
| Guys whose behavior fits the archetype, but only registers a little blip on the radar. | |
| And those are the kinds of guys you're most likely to meet one day. | |
| God willing, most of us will never meet a mass shooter. | |
| But you probably will eventually encounter the kind of guy who just can't take no for an answer. | |
| So he puts a swastika on the menu at the Mickey Mouse Cafe. | |
| Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. | |
| It's research written and recorded by me, Molly Conger. | |
| Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. | |
| The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. | |
| The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. | |
| You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com. | |
| I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. | |
| It's nothing personal. | |
| You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. | |
| Just don't boast anything that's going to make you one of my weird little guys. | |
| The End It's April 2020. | |
| A woman announces on Facebook that she has COVID and won't be seeking medical attention. | |
| I didn't want to be talked out of this plan. | |
| Then she disappears. | |
| Uh, anyone else think this is strange? | |
| I just had to know. | |
| How did this happen? | |
| Listen to What Happened to Talena Czar on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1. Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. | |
| He's just straight evil. | |
| I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known. | |
| At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. | |
| Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. | |
| Explore the winding halls of historical true crime with Holly Fry and Maria Tremarki, hosts of Criminalia, as they uncover curious cases from the past. | |
| The legend of the highwayman suggests men dominated the field, but tell that to Lady Catherine Ferrars, known as the Wicked Lady, who terrorized England in the mid-1600s. | |
| Her legend persists nearly 400 years after her death. | |
| Highwaymen are in the hot seat this season. | |
| Find more crime and cocktails on Criminalia. | |
| Listen to Criminalia. |