In few cases, its true but good news is that in majority of cases where a card has been formatted, the pictures are still on the card and can be recovered.

There are two types of formats that can be performed. They are “Soft Format” and “Hard Format”.

• A "Soft Format" does not erase the card; it simply prepares the card for storing of new pictures and rewrites a file on the card to tell your camera the card is ready. Most digital cameras perform a "Soft" format. If your camera performs a soft format, your pictures will still be on the flash memory card and will be recoverable.
• Recently a few manufacturers of digital cameras have started writing software that actually writes zeros to all memory locations on a flash card during the format process. And this type of format is a "Hard Format". If your camera is one of these, your pictures will not be recoverable due to having been overwritten by the zeros during the card format.

Here you have two options for recovery. You can either choose a Data Recovery Software or go for Data recovery Services.

If you choose Data Recovery Software then go for a Digital Media Recovery Software which helps recovering pictures lost due to formatting the drive. It supports almost all photo formats used by popular digital cameras including JPG, JPEG, TIF, TIFF, PNG, BMP, GIF etc. It also supports video & music formats including AVI, MOV, MPG, MP4, MP3, WAV and more. Or else you can even send your drive to a professional Data Recovery Services for recovery, who are capable to recovering data from a Formatted Memory Card.