Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, a Goliath debt buyer, files about 3,000 lawsuits per week against alleged debtors.

PRA knows the lists of debts it purchases from original creditors are riddled with errors, but presses forward before verifying the debt.

Government agencies such as the CFPB and State Attorney Generals have come to settlements with PRA over the conduct. Much of the restitution PRA made was to old people and people of color who lost in court when PRA sued them.

PRA is relentless when it is plaintiff in a case. There was one interesting, rare person who fought back named “Susan Young”. (04CV-20-197, Benton County Arkansas Circuit Court) PRA dismissed that case eventually. The reason it caught my attention is that there is a corrupt judge named Susan Weaver who was “Susan Young” briefly, due to a short-lived marriage. Maybe just a coincidence, but unconfirmed rumor has it that Judge Weaver had debt issues and she went to college in Fayetteville, in Benton County neck of the woods. This is just interesting speculation.

What I do know is that when I sued PRA for violating the FDCPA and causing intentional infliction of emotional distress against me, PRA brought out the big guns to defend itself.

They hired Rose Law Firm of Hillary Clinton fame. They hired a second big national firm called Troutman-Pepper. They filed motions that were hundreds of pages long and full of lies.

The judge on the case, Lee P. Rudofsky, appears to have a big-business bias. The Harvard trained judge was Solicitor General in Arkansas after working as counsel to Wal-Mart. He acts like Portfolio Recovery is not known to file false affidavits. He looked at the simple math errors made on the one statement produced by PRA and did not discount the statement. He saw that PRA claimed the alleged debt carried an interest rate of 29.4% on one document and an interest rate of 0.00% on another document, but did not accept the debt PRA bought for pennies on the dollar was invalid.

It looks to me like I have an uphill battle to fight. It looks that way to PRA, also. The fancy lawyers are getting real arrogant and bossy. Like they “own the court.”

While I was sick with COVID, PRA attorneys kept sending me demands to give them a list of people who I consider “employees”. Here is the latest letter with my response in red.

Ms. Hammett,

PRA has no interest in your “confidential” information and, outside of Dr. Adhia and PRA counsel, has disclosed it to no one. PRA posted my confidential information on PACER and I documented the contemptuous acts. Dr. Adhia’s report specifically excluded a “Confidential” designation and Dr. Adhia said he does not consider the exam as confidential. He said that he told me the exam was not confidential and that I proceeded. He failed to mention that I first corrected him as to the confidentiality.

You, however, have from the inception of this case tried to leverage threats to disclose PRA’s confidential and proprietary information – by “getting loud” PRA has access to all my blog posts and there is not a single confidential disclosure.– to extract an exorbitant settlement from PRA. PRA violated the Consent Order concerning me before the Consent Order expired. PRA already paid $8M in fines for the same behavior and it did not slow PRA down. I offered to settle for far less than that. I did as much work as the CFPB, without any compensation for my time and taking all the risk. As a public action, I anticipate the CFPB will collect quite a bit more than $8M. If PRA agreed to the settlement of our private right of action, the government would collect the appropriate percentage of my settlement as tax. Indeed, you have expressly stated your intent to publicly share as much of PRA’s confidential information as possible. I have not said anything of the sort. Put that in the bin with the other PRA lies, such as PRA’s invention of “online (therefore illegal) poker losses” and that PRA did not call my cell phone repeatedly in September and October 2020.

In your recent barrage of filings, you indicated that you have provided PRA’s confidential materials to other individuals No, I quite specifically said I had not provided confidential materials to Mr. Paisola yet.and that by errantly self-labelling these individuals as your “employees” that you can do so in contravention of the Protective Order with impunity. PRA does not have a monopoly on hiring employees. Note that PRA refused to disclose the names of any employees in response to discovery requests. Perhaps coincidentally, but likely as wrongdoing by PRA, I told PRA two of my employees’ names and within days, each of those employees ghosted me.

It is highly unlikely you have any actual “employees,” which is a term of art with a very specific meaning. PRA is pompous and self-absorbed. Note that PRA hired two law firms and has a legal department with hundreds of employees helping to try to crush a 60-year-old non-attorney and expects her to do every bit of the work without help. After being given documentation that the older woman has COVID and an auto-immune disease, PRA sent a barrage of demands to the woman telling her she must create employee records and disclose them to PRA, while she has COVID. Merely calling someone an “employee” does not make it so.  Your latest attempt to sidestep Judge Rudofsky’s protective order is improper.

To be clear, my client does not wish to file a motion.  There have been far too many of those in this case already. We agree on one point; this should have been a simple case. It did not warrant a thousand page motion for summary judgment or a protective order that requires a motion to unseal “Confidential” documents that already exist in the exact form (with different data) elsewhere on the internet.

Rather, my client’s sole objective is to ascertain who is in possession of its confidential materials, properly or otherwise, and to ensure that PRA’s confidential materials remain protected. PRA is inventing things to worry about. PRA has not seen any posting of its confidential information by me or anyone remotely related to me, because there has been no inappropriate disclosures. PRA on the other hand has violated the protective order and the signed confidentiality agreement from the settlement conference.

At present, you are refusing to identify the individual(s) to whom you have disclosed PRA documents designated as confidential under the protective order.  We ask once more that you do so. I am not aware of any mechanism for you to make that demand. I copy and pasted your demand, changing the name of the requesting party, and you ignored that demand completely. All of this will be shared with proper authorities and the public at the appropriate time.

Should you once again refuse, PRA reserves all rights in this regard (attached).

I wrote a motion under Rule 11 against PRA in my head when I could not sit up to write it on the computer. I will add this latest threat if I decide to put the Rule 11 Motion in writing now that I am able to sit up. Frankly, I think the reports to the CFPB and the IRS are more important. There will be no confidential information included, but I will point out that you convinced the Court to keep evidence of PRA’s wrongdoing confidential.

Regards,

Jim (The debt buyer company attorney who filed for bankruptcy himself to get out from under his insurmountable debt.)

Laura Hammett