A well-known plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills, who has been on TV shows like “Botched” and “The Doctors,” is facing a lawsuit. Patients are suing him. They claim that after he was hacked twice, their nude photos were put online. And they say he waited for months before telling them about these data breaches.
Eight patients filed a class-action lawsuit earlier this month. They say Dr. Jaime Schwartz didn’t have good enough cybersecurity, even though he got multiple warnings. As a result, very sensitive information was stolen and posted on the internet. The story was first reported by 404 media.
This week, Dr. Schwartz’s office didn’t reply when asked for a comment.
According to the lawsuit, the data that was hacked included patients’ names, phone numbers, home addresses, driver’s licenses, insurance details, credit card information, and medical information. The lawsuit also says that photos and videos of patients, some of them nude or partially clothed, were hacked. There were even images of patients having surgery while under anesthesia. The lawsuit claims that Dr. Schwartz didn’t tell patients about the first hack in September 2023 or the second one in March 2024 in a timely or proper way. He also didn’t fix security problems between these two incidents.
The lawsuit says that he only told patients this January. This was after some patients found out about the breaches online. It also claims that he didn’t tell the California attorney general’s office or the state Health and Human Services Agency as required.
The complaint states, “Even though Dr. Schwartz knew that his patients’ most private medical data was in the hands of bad people, he waited almost 10 months to tell them.” It also says, “Finally, after patients’ nude photos and home addresses started being posted online, where anyone with the internet could see them, Dr. Schwartz sent a quick, unclear, and misleading notice about the data breach.” The lawsuit says that because of the hacks, patients are at risk of identity theft. They are also suffering a lot of emotional distress because they are humiliated, shocked, worried, and anxious that their information and photos might be or already have been posted online. The attorney for the plaintiffs, Damion Robinson, said that the compensatory and punitive damages they are asking for will probably be in the “tens of millions of dollars.”
The plaintiffs say that Dr. Schwartz is a prominent plastic surgeon. He has over 189,000 followers on Instagram and has offices in Beverly Hills and Dubai. They claim that he had enough warnings that he needed to protect his clients’ data, but he didn’t take the necessary steps to secure his network. The complaint says, “Dr. Schwartz and others in the medical field, especially in plastic surgery, have been warned for years by government agencies and professional organizations that hackers target them to get sensitive patient data for ransom and extortion.”
In the past few years, hackers have been targeting plastic surgery practices. The sensitive data these practices store can be used for identity theft. Hackers also try to extort doctors and patients. In a 2019 report, the American Medical Assn. said that 83% of physicians had been through some kind of cyberattack. They said that cybersecurity is “a patient safety issue.”
According to a report from DataBreaches.net, between 2017 and 2023, there were at least 13 publicly reported cyberattacks on plastic surgery practices. In 2023, the FBI issued a public service announcement. It warned that criminals were targeting plastic surgery offices to get personal information and sensitive medical records. In some cases, they were also after sensitive photographs.
The lawsuit claims that hackers have already published the personal information of 30 of Dr. Schwartz’s patients. They are threatening to keep doing this until they get a ransom.
The lawsuit says that after the first hack was reported online, a few patients contacted Dr. Schwartz. He told them that only a small number of patients were affected and that other patients’ information was safe. After the second data breach in March 2024, the hackers made a public website. They announced what they did and shared patients’ photos and data. According to the complaint, Dr. Schwartz didn’t tell his patients until January. Then he sent them a message saying: “Our office discovered on June 27, 2024, that an unauthorized third party used a third-party vendor’s credentials to access the practice’s medical billing and practice management system. When we found out, we hired a specialized third-party forensic incident response firm to investigate and see how bad the problem was. The investigation showed that data was taken without permission. After electronic discovery, which ended on January 2, 2025, we found out that some of your personal information was in the data that was affected. Then we tried to tell you about the incident as soon as we could.”
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