A German clinic: the bot that invented its doctors' credentials
A cosmetic-surgery company ran a website chatbot that told users its two managing physicians held specialist titles in plastic and aesthetic surgery. They did not. A claimant sued under the Unfair Competition Act, and the Higher Regional Court of Hamm held the company liable: the invented answers were its own misleading commercial statements, and whoever runs a chatbot bears the risk of what it makes up, even when the system was fed correct information. Docket 4 UKl 3/25.
What the verified record says.
- Organizations
- Unnamed German cosmetic-surgery clinic; Higher Regional Court of Hamm (OLG Hamm)
- When
- 2025Resolved May 12, 2026
- Failure class
- Silent wrong output silent-wrong-output
- Discovered by
- Opposing counsel or a claimant counsel Not caught by the organization running the AI
- Missing control
- Grounded answers. Answers about policy, price, or law pulled from verified documents at answer time, never generated from the model's memory. Full definition and the other incidents in this group → Watch this kind of control catch a planted failure → A recorded run of a certificate gate refusing a bad document →
- What would have caught it
- Pre-publication accuracy review of what a customer-facing bot may assert about credentials or prices; a monthly accuracy report would have surfaced it.
- Sources
- Verification
- Confirmed: the claims held as first researched. Court, docket and date confirmed: Higher Regional Court of Hamm, 4 UKl 3/25, May 12, 2026, under the Unfair Competition Act. It is a different case from the Munich AI Overviews ruling of the same month, and the two are easy to conflate. Verified against the primary source on August 25, 2026. Published on this site August 26, 2026, updated September 1, 2026.
This record is one of 26 in The receipts, each checked against a primary source before it is published. How the list is built →