I filed a lawsuit against Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC because they called me hundreds of times and would not tell me who they were or why they were calling until I verified a previous address, my birthday or the last four of my social security number on a recorded line.

PRA opened the call by informing me it was a recorded line, but in Arkansas, one may presume all calls are recorded by the instigator. I don’t think it wise to speak to random callers, speaking your name and identifying information without knowing who the caller is and how your voice will be used in the future.

How easy would it be for some nefarious folk to edit a recording, splicing in their victim’s alleged acceptance of a trial offer, a book of the month club or a credit card?

Portfolio Recovery Associates, a subsidiary of publicly traded PRA Group, Inc., refused to stop calling me unless I let them record a conversation.

I tried blocking their number. They called from another one. They have an unlimited supply.

I tried letting the calls go to voice mail. They did not leave a message and kept calling. I was ill and had insomnia. PRA woke me from much needed naps on more than one occasion.

I tape recorded the first substantive conversation I had with the junk debt buyer, of which I am aware. I would not give them my address but did tell them emphatically not to call me again. They called again. And again.

After I gave them my address and made a plausible threat of a lawsuit, they stopped calling. I filed the suit before they resumed calling or sold the alleged debt to another PRA Group, Inc. subsidiary and let me know that I should expect another round of obnoxious calls to start in the future.

I was expecting about $5,000 in actual damages and over a million in punitive damages from a jury verdict. I offered to settle for a million. I would have settled for less, but not under $50,000.

I’ve seen an alleged $50,000 settlement PRA gave to a convicted fraudster for similar conduct. [I will provide this his name to you for verification. Simply ask. I originally published his name but decided that plays into the debt buyer’s desire to excuse their annoying conduct by shifting the blame to the victim by exposing the victim’s sins, real or imagined.]

Instead, PRA forced me to let them see my complete medical and psychiatric history. They forced me to be examined by an out-of-state psychiatrist that I think is a shyster, quack, liar and incompetent.

The supposed expert, Dr. Sanjay Adhia, wrote a report and refused to mark it confidential. He implied that I agreed the exam and resulting report would not be confidential by continuing to speak to him. He omitted that I told him the exam must be kept confidential except of course between PRA’s attorneys and the doctor.

Further research taught me that Dr. Adhia obtained his medical degree from a university in India. (He was born in the United States, in Michigan, according to records he provided to a medical board in Texas.) I could not find a record of him with India’s equivalent of a medical board. It was about four years between Dr. Adhia’s alleged graduation from medical school in India and his next recorded activity in the health industry.

Judge Rudofsky, a Trump appointee, decided that no rational juror could decide the phone calls were intended to annoy, abuse or harass.

“Likewise, no rational juror could conclude that the substance of the phone calls between
Ms. Hammett and PRA, LLC manifested such an intent. PRA, LLC never threatened Ms.
Hammett, used obscene language with Ms. Hammett, misrepresented who it was, or otherwise
engaged in any conversations that could lead a rational juror to conclude that PRA, LLC, through
its phone calls, intended to annoy, abuse, or harass Ms. Hammett.”

Judge Rudofsky does not consider refusing to say what company is calling as misrepresenting who was calling.

Judge Rudofsky cited this caselaw:

“Similarly, in VanHorn v. Genpact Services, LLC, Judge Fenner of the Western District of Missouri explained that, ‘[w]hen reading § 1692d in its entirety, it is evident [that] absent egregious conduct or intent to annoy, abuse, or harass, a debt collector does not violate the FDCPA by persistently calling in the attempt to reach a debtor regarding a debt owed and due.’”

I did not have a debt to PRA owed and due. Judge Rudofsky referred to text generated by PRA “(illustrating that the record likely leads to only one possible conclusion––that Ms. Hammett owed PRA, LLC $2,297.63).”

The sentence Judge Rudofsky wrote requires the advanced study of sentence structure to determine that he did not necessarily agree with PRA. He then followed up with a misquotation of what I wrote:

“I am a consumer in respect to any debt incurred by me on a credit card issued by Capital One Bank (USA) in or about 2001.”

That sentence makes it look like I possibly incurred a debt on a Capital One credit card.

My actual sentence was “I am a consumer in respect to any debt incurred by me on a credit card issued by Capital One Bank (USA) in or about 2001, as I used any credit card to purchase household items, food and other consumer items.”

My intent was to say I had no business debt until I started investing in the stock market in 2017. Any debt incurred by me, before that, to anyone, was for consumerism. PRA had yet to argue the alleged debt was for business purposes, but I wanted to foreclose that argument.

Judge Rudofsky knows the shorthand used by attorneys and judges. Judge Lee P. Rudofsky studied at Cornell and Harvard. He has academic intelligence that is probably quite a bit higher than Dr. Sanjay Adhia’s academic intelligence.

It seems that Judge Rudofsky had an agenda, that was not to do the right thing, when he truncated my sentence without adding the character chain “[]” where he omitted a clause before the period.

I wrote about this many months ago. Why am I repeating myself?

My son recently complained about receiving annoying calls and texts. Not debt collectors. Random sales pitches.

He wanted to know who to complain to and where to find information about filing a small claims suit for violations of the Do Not Call list.

There are statutes, similar to the FDCPA, the statute I claim PRA violated, that forbid persons from calling a personal line if the owner of the line is registered on the National Do Not Call Registry.

But enforcing that law is almost impossible. It requires discovering who is calling. Good luck with that.

If you do find out who is calling, like I did with PRA, by tape recording the conversation and disclosing more of your personal information than you are comfortable disclosing, you then need to sue them.

If your judge is Lee P. Rudofsky or similar, he will probably say the call was not annoying.

If you are lucky enough to find an honest textualist judge, you will probably be awarded $500.

Then you need to collect. Good luck again.

The easier way to handle the problem is to report the transgressor to the FTC.

Pardon my cynicism, but those complaints probably get filed in the round file system. The bureaucracies are toothless tigers.

The law is useless when the judiciary refuses to heed the will of the People.

The vast majority of us want the junk calls to stop.

There has to be a Court at some level that agrees.