On September 2, 2026, Hagens Berman announced that Hims & Hers Health and certain executives now face a securities class action arising directly from the FTC's July 29 complaint — converting a consumer-protection enforcement action into a shareholder-liability problem. The class period runs August 4, 2025 through July 29, 2026, with a lead plaintiff deadline of November 2, 2026. Separately, in the days before, Inc. reported that the company's board of directors is facing its own investigation over the billing and subscription practices at the heart of the FTC case, and Scott+Scott announced a probe of Hims directors for alleged breaches of fiduciary duty.

Why It Matters

Afterglow has tracked the FTC case since it was filed, and this is the phase change. Regulatory enforcement is survivable and often settles. Securities litigation plus a derivative fiduciary-duty probe is a different animal: it puts internal controls, board oversight and executive disclosure decisions into discovery, and it does not go away because a company negotiates with an agency. For the wider sexual-health telehealth category — where Hims is the largest public pure-play and therefore the sector's de facto comparable — the read-through is about what gets said in an S-1 or a 10-K. Every operator in ED, hormone therapy and intimate-health telehealth runs ad pixels on intake flows and monetizes through auto-renewing subscriptions. Those are not fringe practices; they are the category's economic engine. What this case establishes is that describing your privacy safeguards in investor-facing language, while an agency later alleges the opposite in a complaint, is now a litigable gap. The compliance spend that follows will not be evenly distributed: incumbents can absorb it, and the seed-stage competitors trying to undercut Hims on customer acquisition cost cannot. Time-sensitive note for anyone tracking the docket: the lead plaintiff deadline is November 2, 2026.

The securities complaint is narrower and sharper than the underlying FTC suit. It targets Hims' repeated public assurances that the company "developed and maintain[s] policies and procedures with respect to health information and personal information that we use or disclose in connection with our operations, including the adoption of administrative, physical, and technical safeguards to protect such information." Against that language, the complaint alleges Hims (1) shared consumers' health information with third-party advertising platforms; (2) charged consumers for prescriptions almost immediately after intake-form submission despite promising a provider consultation to find a treatment "right for them"; and (3) was therefore exposed to heightened regulatory scrutiny and probable fees and penalties that investors were not told about.

The market damage is quantified in the filing. On the July 29 disclosure, HIMS fell $4.32 — roughly 14.7% — erasing over $970 million in market capitalization in a single session. "We're focused on whether Hims may have intentionally misled investors about its business practices, including the adequacy of its internal controls, and financial ramifications of the alleged misconduct," said Reed Kathrein, the Hagens Berman partner leading the firm's investigation.

The underlying FTC action — brought alongside the State of Utah and Los Angeles County Counsel on behalf of California — pairs two theories. The privacy count alleges Hims shared sensitive medical conditions and personal health data with Meta and Snap via embedded tracking pixels and customer-list matching, despite marketing built explicitly on discretion and data protection. The billing count alleges violations of the Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act: enrolling consumers in recurring prescription subscriptions without informed consent, billing on intake-form completion before any clinical consultation, and burying cancellation behind dark patterns.

Sources

Update — 2026-09-06

{Initial entry — story first created.}

Update — 2026-10-09

New chief accounting officer while the lawsuits continue. On October 7, 2026, Hims & Hers announced that Jon Franklin, a CPA with about two decades in technical accounting roles, is its new Chief Accounting Officer, reporting to CFO Yemi Okupe. An October 7 SEC filing, summarised by Quiver Quantitative, shows that Franklin started on October 5 and becomes principal accounting officer on October 9. He replaces Irene Becklund, whose resignation effective October 9 was disclosed in July along with an advisory arrangement that runs into 2027. HIMS fell about 5% on October 8. Quiver's AI-assisted analysis described the filing as the most visible fresh catalyst, while noting that the transition had been planned.

The same week, plaintiff firms kept marketing the securities class action covered above. Hagens Berman's October 7 notice repeats the August 4, 2025 – July 29, 2026 class period and the November 2, 2026 lead-plaintiff deadline. Nothing in the filings links Becklund's departure to the litigation, and the timing was disclosed months ago. Still, investors will watch any change in who signs off on the financial statements while the FTC's privacy and billing claims are being litigated, and the first 10-Q under the new CAO will draw extra scrutiny of disclosure language about privacy safeguards and subscription billing.

New Sources