Portfolio Recovery Associates Continues to Torment Consumer Years After Closing the Account

I filed a lawsuit, pro se, against Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC. The Big Business Billionaire debt collection company set the balance on the account to zero and closed the account, they say, “in light of the ongoing litigation.” Then they threw me a bone, an inadequate settlement offer, and expected me to run off with it.

That was almost four years ago. The case is at the United States Supreme Court on petition for writ of certiorari. (Sup. Ct. No. 24-6113)

It was not enough for PRA to win at the lower courts due to a Pro Big Business Billionaire – Anti-individual judge named Lee P. Rudofsky. The lawyers from Rose Law Firm and Troutman Pepper who represent the PRA Group, Inc. subsidiary came up with a ruse.

There may be a clerk at the Supreme Court of the United States involved. (I informed the clerk of this mistake weeks ago and it has not been corrected.) I filed a motion to file some documents that were sealed by Rudofsky and the Eighth Circuit initially sealed and then immediately unsealed at the Supreme Court. the motion was “Granted”. But it was docketed as filed two weeks before it was filed, when the petition was filed. And the documents were filed under seal the day after the motion was granted and not unsealed.

When I saw “Motion Granted” I posted the documents on this blog. The next day, after talking to a staff member at SCOTUS, I deleted the link from the blog page. But people who received the email copy of the post still had the link and the link still worked.

I’ve heard that just deleting something doesn’t ever really remove it from the internet. It was a mystery and I let PRA know that I didn’t know the magic trick that would make those emailed links quit working.

PRA filed an “emergency” motion on December 20th, 11 days after my post was emailed to them, and asked the court to take down this entire blog “until such time as PRA can be assured its confidential documents are no longer publicly accessible” along with about a year’s worth of my total income.

I worked through Christmas week researching and writing a response to try to save my blog from disappearing. Judge Rudofsky told me in a written docket entry order that he would not give me past December 27th.

Judge Rudofsky gave PRA’s team of attorneys 10 days to reply to my response.

The email you can download below was entered in the reply as an exhibit. It is from WordPress’ parent company and was sent on December 21st. It says, in part, “If the documents are still available, the fastest way to remove them would be for Ms. Hammett to contact wordpress support and they can assist her.”

Wow! PRA must have been really concerned about the confidentiality of the documents. NOT! They probably knew the four clicks I would need to make to break the links to the documents. They definitely knew who I could speak with to find out how it can be done. They knew that taking down my blog was like dropping a nuclear bomb to kill a gnat.

I’m going to file another complaint against PRA and its attorneys for intentional infliction of emotional distress. If the court orders my blog to be “taken down” then I will ask for $1,000,000 per year for all the years I was actively writing. That is about the same as PRA’s risk manager’s base salary.

I would have preferred to spend Christmas as planned, cherishing peaceful moments with my granddaughter and my husband, who is battling stage IV cancer. However, a 6- or 7-million-dollar jury verdict should make PRA think twice before retaliating against a victim of its abusive practices—someone brave enough to challenge a company that files 3,000 lawsuits a week against everyday people.