A Bay Area physician allegedly skimmed a nearly million bucks by buying fake Botox from online pharmacies, and selling it to patients as the real thing.
SFist loves a good Botox scandal, and while we are not Los Angeles, we’ve had a few good ones here over the years. The grandmommy of them all was the 2011 story of “Botox Mom,” who created an international uproar after supposedly giving her 8-year-old daughter Botox injections and bikini waxes to help her win child beauty pageants, yet the whole story turned out to be a hoax, and the woman had been paid $200 by British tabloid The Sun to simply make up a clickbait story for them. Four years later, we had a Botox Bandit who would get thousands of dollars of work done on his face, and then cleverly slip out without paying the bill.
More Botox high jinks have been injected into the news cycle, and this may concern you if you’ve had “Botox” injections from a Dr. Lindsay Clark. The Chronicle reports that Clark has been indicted by a federal grand jury for selling fake Botox, or rather, counterfeit Botox purchased from shady online pharmacies, and then selling it as full-price, legitimate Botox.
According to the indictment, Clark did business in both San Francisco and San Mateo counties.
“Clark allegedly obtained these products from sources abroad, primarily by ordering the drugs and devices over the phone and internet,” according to the indictment. “The indictment alleges that Clark purchased at least $270,951 worth of products from these foreign online ‘pharmacies’ and ‘depots,’ and obtained revenue from services rendered in connection with these products, perhaps more than $1,069,880.”
According to Clark’s website, which is still online, she has operated out of offices in San Francisco, San Mateo, and Monterey.* Her personal bio decribes her as a “member of the American Academy of Anti-Aging Medicine,” a controversial organization that many doctors feel promotes quack science. The American Medical Association does not recognize “anti-aging” as a legitimate field of medicine.
Dr. Clark is out on bond, and is scheduled to appear in a U.S. District Court again on June 4.
Related: Botox Mom Shocker: Phony Name, Phony Residence [SFist]
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*This article has been updated to remove the name of a business on Buchanan Street where Dr. Clark had once rented space over a year and a half ago, but a business which she does not own or manage herself, according to the owner.
