Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, a subsidiary of publicly traded PRA Group, Inc, is notorious for making incessant phone calls to alleged debtors, even though PRA knows the lists of debts it purchased from credit card companies like Capital One Bank are riddled with errors.

PRA is repeatedly sued for violations of the FDCPA, the Federal Debt Collection Practices Act. In the Podunk federal district court of Eastern Arkansas alone, there are about 40 such cases, some being class action.

My experience is that PRA will offer $1,000 or $5,000 to settle the litigation. Most of the attorneys I called in the hopes of obtaining representation said they would settle for that amount plus attorney fees. The data I collected on the non-confidential settlements show that there are rarely higher settlements.

The problem with settling for $5,000 is that the goliath company rakes in hundreds of millions per year of pure profit. The majority of their take is from default judgments, and most of the alleged debtors do not know how to defend themselves. If PRA only has to toss a bone once in a while, it makes economic sense for the company to continue using the same obnoxious tactics.

I did find one person online who wrote that he received $50,000 in settlement from Portfolio Recovery Associates. I normally would post the litigant’s name for verification purposes. In this circumstance, the litigant asked not to be identified. The reason he does not want to be identified is that I am discussing the litigant’s past bad behavior. He is a felon.

My original contention was that PRA should offer me at least as much as it offered a convicted fraudster and sexual predator.

But that is falling into the trap PRA hopes judges and juries will fall into.

In my case against the notorious debt collector, the attorneys could not find anything particularly reprehensible about my character. So, they lied. They invented gambling debts for me, based on my passion for playing poker. (I mostly play for fake money on Zynga and Poker Bros. When I do play for real money, I limit my losses appropriately and usually win enough to pay for my trip.)

On top of lying, the lie is not even relevant. The attorneys for PRA said that I only sued PRA because I wanted to replace money that I lost in other ways that don’t have to do with Portfolio Recovery. I actually did lose a lot of money when the stock market crashed in March 2020. So?

PRA and its army of attorneys, persons that file thousands of lawsuits per week in the hopes of filling their bank accounts, propose that we close access to the courts to anyone who is not of significant financial means. If a person has a gambling addiction, violate her rights in any way you choose. If a person was convicted of a felony 20 years ago, make his life miserable by filing false statements about him with the credit bureaus.

The PRA Attorneys are unclear about what infirmities of character should cause the court doors to slam closed on a person. One attorney representing the alleged debt buyer on my case borrowed so much money that he could not pay it back. Then he filed for bankruptcy. I don’t think Mr. Attorney’s bad fortune should slam the door to justice in his face. I do think he and PRA are hypocrites for suggesting that someone else’s poor economic state should bar her from availing herself of our legal system.

If a debt collector called me over and over, from different neighbor spoofing numbers each call, refused to tell me what company was calling until I agreed to let them tape record an inquisition and refused to quit claiming I owed money to them until after I filed a lawsuit against them, I would not settle for a $5,000 payment. Even knowing the creeps would dig into my private life and, if they could not find anything juicy enough to gossip about, that they would invent sins to attribute to me.

Really, there are people who could find a reason to crucify Jesus Christ himself. I am not going to withstand scrutiny, and neither will you. That does not give the moneyed elite the right to purposefully annoy, abuse or harass any of us.