Courts Help Portfolio Recovery Associates: Here is help for You
Portfolio Recovery Associates is not slowing down.
Even as the stock of parent company PRA Group, Inc. plummets, the debt buyer is dialing for dollars.
It took me filing a lawsuit for violation of the FDCPA and intrusion on seclusion for me to convince Portfolio to quit their incessant calling.
It didn’t end well for me. Judge Rudofsky said no reasonable juror could think that the debt collector’s calls were too annoying. PRA got a judgment for over $8,000 to reimburse their costs of defending themselves. Judge Rudofsky said that even though that is more than my annual income, I didn’t list my expenses, so it wasn’t unjust to make me pay the equivalent of a year’s pension to the billion-dollar company. Easy for him to say, living off a six-figure government job.
But, don’t give up. In a different jurisdiction, for similar conduct, PRA was hit with an $82 million jury verdict. Other pro se litigants are making leeway. And Portfolio Recovery did make a $5,000 Offer of Judgment to me – I just went all in and the dealer pulled PRA’s card off the bottom of the deck.
I hope this document showing a Portfolio Recovery Associates call log, charge off data compiled and contact log will help you convince your judge not to let the defendant cover-up similar documents in your case.
Open Response to Email By Someone Interested in Joining a Class Action Against Debt Collectors in New York
Hi. I already filed a lawsuit on my own and lost. Lost on appeal. Was denied discretionary review at the Supreme Court.
I am not an attorney. I scored 162 on the LSAT (Ivy League score) and am accepted tuition free to law school. So, it is over three years before I can help anyone else in court.
I have uploaded many of my filings and filings that won on my website. http://www.court-corruption.com. Also some videos on my YouTube @StopBigBusinessBillionaires
Where did you find me?
The most important advice I can give you in a nutshell, record and document every call. The collector in my case claimed the first hundred calls to my cell phone in 2020 were not made. I hadn’t recorded them and all the numbers I called that were on my phone bill (including the ones they said they called from) they had disconnected.
If a person owed the debts and the statute of limitations expired, the person still owes the money. But the creditor can’t collect in court. They can still call or write to ask the debtor to pay, but are supposed to stop if asked in the same way they contact the person. Regulation F. The calls to me happened before Regulation F went into effect. I was required to put my Cease and Desist in writing. It was a violation for them to try to collect after the C+D. The judge on my case said the interrogatories and affidavit of identity theft or fraud they tried to get me to fill out was not an attempt to collect a debt.
If one of the collectors is Portfolio Recovery Associates, look at the 2015 consent order and the 2023 stipulated judgment for violating that restraint order. Those documents and documents of a winning case with an $82 million jury verdict called Mejia v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC are on my blog and you can download them for free.
If you write your own lawsuit, based on a winning lawsuit or one that was settled as a template, they may throw a little money at you. I had an offer of judgment for $5,000. I think a jury would find damages to be significantly higher, but the judge in Arkansas was not letting it go to trial if I had a video of the debt collector handing him a briefcase full of cash.
Thank you for writing. I almost didn’t open your email because the name of the sender sounded like scam. I’m glad I did open it and hope you find someone who will represent you.
Laura
Judge’s Pet, PRA Group (PRAA), Owner of Unethical Debt Collector, Stock is Stuck!
When I filed my lawsuit against Portfolio Recovery Associates in 2021, its parent company PRA Group, Inc’s stock was selling around $20 per share. Today it sold for $13 plus change.
I don’t mean to be a schadenfreudist, but watching PRAA’s stock nosedive genuinely made my day. Maybe true schadenfreude is about undeserved suffering — and this isn’t that. This is earned misery. PRAA is a pet litigant of Federalist Society cabalist Judge Lee Rudofsky, and if justice exists, this is just the beginning of their bad news.
A Document Portfolio Recovery Associates Did Not Want You To See
In going through the record, looking for documents that the federal district court in Arkansas and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered me to destroy, I found one for which secrecy was denied. Praise the Lord!
Maybe reading it will give you ideas about how to approach your own suit against PRA for making annoying and harassing phone calls to you. I am not an attorney and I lost my case, but sometimes we learn more from other people’s mistakes and we can prepare for the expected attack by the defense.
I will go into detail after my mandatory assignments are complete. For now, even reading the first few pages, it is clear that Judge Lee P. Rudofsky lied when he said that I agreed that I owed the debt.
“No reasonable juror can conclude there was a debt from Hammett to PRA.” – Paragraph 11
“PRA still produced no account level documentation for the alleged debt and I have no record of my Capital One account opened in 2001 other than the unsupported conclusion of PRA.” – paragraph 14
Feel free to contact me in the comments, or by email to bohemian_books@yahoo.com. Enjoy the FREE Doc of the Day:
Eighth Circuit Accepts Documentation Supplied By Untrustworthy Company
I tried to use that order in my case against Portfolio Recovery Associates. District Court Judge Rudofsky said it was not relevant. Just because PRA violated hundreds of thousands of other consumers and agreed to pay $24,000,000 in restitution and fines didn’t mean the documents they produced in my case were inaccurate, according to the big business puppet judge.
Judge Rudofsky forbid me from taking the case to a jury. The Eighth Circuit affirmed his orders.
Judge Rudofsky said I cannot disclose what is in any of the “evidence” presented by the debt collector. I can tell you it was not accurate.
Judge Rudofsky said the debt collector did not need a copy of a credit card agreement between the original creditor and me. He said there was no need for the alleged account to be referenced on a bill of sale or any other documentation. There was no credit card agreement. There was no link between a purchase made by PRA and the account associated with me.
How do you know I am telling the truth?
If I committed perjury when I made these same claims all the way up to the Supreme Court, you better believe there would be perjury charges filed against me.
Since our judges are essentially tyrants, there is a chance one will collude with a prosecutor and kangaroo court me into jail. But it would be a lot harder than what was done to me in civil court. I would be entitled to counsel, instead of representing myself. The sealed documents would be exculpatory evidence and it would be awkward for a judge to deny me the right to show the public the evidence. It would look even worse than the Star Chamber in which Judge Rudofsky ordered me to pay a full year of my pension to the billion dollar company to reimburse for the cost of their defense.
Hopefully, you have an honest judge in your case. The Arizona lawyer in the video above should be right. You should be able to use the stipulated order against Portfolio Recovery Associates to beat prosecution by them and to win an FDCPA or invasion of privacy case against them.
Do me a favor please. Don’t settle for $5,000. One jury on a similar case to mine decided PRA should pay $82,000,000 in punitive damages. And even that didn’t slow them down.
The Court and Big Business Billionaire Defendant Allowed to Discuss Sealed Documents on Public Record: Mums the Word for Pro Se Plaintiff
In a case against the most annoying and offensive debt collector, Portfolio Recovery Associates, Judge Lee P. Rudofsky made it clear that the pro se plaintiff, me, was not allowed to discuss sealed documents on the public record.
After Judge Rudofsky finally recused himself, the fresh judge reiterated the threat of sanctions for disclosure of sealed evidence.
But Judge Rudofsky and Portfolio Recovery Associates repeatedly violated their own call for the cone of silence.
Here is a copy (that you can download for free) of plaintiff’s deposition redacted by Portfolio Recovery Associates. They were supposed to redact mentions of the sealed documents – but they didn’t.
For example, look at page 77, line 7. PRA attorney James Trefil of huge defense firm Troutman Pepper starts discussing Exhibits 9, 10 and 11. PRA marked those “CONFIDENTIAL” and filed under seal. There is one short redacted section, then Mr. Trefil asks about the specific data from Exhibit 9.
That is not keeping sealed documents confidential.
Worse, Portfolio Recovery disclosed what was supposedly on a document I designated as “CONFIDENTIAL”. On page 116, line 17. Mr. Trefil: “For the record, this is a confidential document.
This is plaintiff’s credit report. Are you familiar with this document?” His next sentence: “Do you see where says it Midland Credit [?]”
Wow! That is not keeping it confidential. And without seeing the entire document, it is misleading. But Mr. Trefil on behalf of Portfolio Recovery Associates did not stop at just insinuating there were debts showing on my credit report.
“So what debt of yours does Midland Credit Management hold?”
“None [!]”
“It’s showing up on your credit report.”
Liar! “It says, ‘The listing of a company’s inquiry in this section means that they obtained information from your credit file in connection with an account review or other business transaction with you. These inquiries are not seen by anyone but you. They will not be used in scoring your credit file except insurance companies may have access,’ blah, blah, blah about the insurance companies. So I don’t know why they made a soft inquiry, but Portfolio Recovery also made a soft inquiry and it’s on the same report, isn’t it?”
“I don’t see Portfolio on this report. I might just be missing it.”
“Did I give you both? I got two — I contacted all three credit agencies, but I only got two reports back and I don’t think this is the one that has Portfolio Recovery on it. I think it’s the other one. Yeah, Portfolio Recovery made a soft inquiry on November 1, 2019. So Midland just is like Portfolio, a –“
“My question is what debt of yours does Midland hold?”
“None that I’m aware of.”
“All right. But you acknowledge they are showing up on your credit report?”
“As a soft inquiry.”
“Understood.”
“They’re allowed to — anybody can look me up. In fact, that might be the way that companies like Portfolio Recovery find their marks is they go in and they look at people’s credit reports and then they contact them and say, hey, you owe us $2,297.63. How do you want to pay for that? And they have — because they have access to these credit reports, they have a whole mess of information about you, so they’re –“
Trefil interrupted my lecture. “What about Enhanced Recovery Company?”
“Same thing. I have no clue who they are. I don’t have any debt, and so they could look.”
“So it’s your sworn testimony here today under oath that you currently have no delinquent debt?”
“I am not aware of any delinquent debt. I have found out –” Another interesting topic comes up from this statement, which will be discussed in a later post. For now it segues into more of the defense divulging what was in its own confidential documents.
“You sound an awful lot like the Capital One representative who wasn’t aware of any mistakes.”
“That what?”
“In the affidavit of sale, [Exhibit 11] you were complaining that the Capital One representative was saying he wasn’t aware of any mistakes in the records that they were giving.”
So here, PRA is telling the public what was said in the “CONFIDENTIAL” affidavit of sale.
In a bigger picture, Judge Rudofsky told the public what was supposedly said in the confidential, sealed documents. He represented that I agreed to owing the debt. He represented that there was accurate records that showed PRA did not call an annoying or harassing number of times. He said that the evidence under seal was so strong, no reasonable juror could disagree with him.
If we were playing poker, I would say PRA bluffed, then Judge Rudofsky as the casino forced me to fold my hand for a manufactured reason, allowing PRA to avoid showing its hand.
The Eighth Circuit upheld that dishonest service and the United States Supreme Court denied my petition for writ of cert and did not mention my motion to unseal the documents on the docket. 24M44.
Here is the motion that was labeled a motion to seal and was “granted”. Despite the record appearing to grant the motion in full, SCOTUS did not unseal the documents. The highest court in the country behaved as if the motion did not request unsealing and ignored the request.
Portfolio Recovery Associates and Other Big Business Billionaires Often Destroy Documents
In my case against Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of PRA Group, Inc. (stock symbol PRAA), Judge Lee P. Rudofsky, the Eighth Circuit and the United States Supreme Court allowed PRA to designate anything and everything it wanted to as “CONFIDENTIAL” and file under seal.
I cannot say what was in the allegedly top secret documents. But I can tell you what was not in them.
There was no evidence of purchases made by me on a credit card. There was no documentation that linked the specific account with a purchase agreement. There was no credit card agreement. There was no third party documentation of the phone calls made by the debt collector to numbers it associated with me. There was nothing that indicated that I agreed I owed the alleged debt.
Worse, there were not consistent records kept by PRA. The data presented was not consistent between any of the supposedly top secret evidence. In other words, one top secret document says one thing, another says another.
This is unfortunately common business practice. For example, I did business with Advantage Service Holdings, LLC d/b/a Advantage Service Company in Arkansas. Advantage installed a forced air unit in my home. The technician did not give me a written warranty. The unit failed quickly. Then Advantage and the manufacturer, Goodman, claimed the “limited warranty” excused them from any technical difficulties.
Neither Advantage, Goodman or the resale outlet gave me a limited warranty, even though I asked the installer for one. Instead, the technician wrote “warranty” on the invoice, with the number of years for compressor, parts, labor and service. In Arkansas State Court, I entered a copy of my invoice as exhibit 2.
I also entered a copy of the invoice Advantage altered. They added a checklist that represented that the technician gave me the “docs”. Scroll down to page 7. Compare to the original invoice above.
The judge on that case dismissed without allowing for a jury trial. It shocks the conscience that so many judges rubberstamp motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment in favor of Big Business Billionaires like Goodman Manufacturing and Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, while staring at the face of obvious alterations of documentation.
We need A New America For the People.*
*My son Buddy Lynn had a tragic life, destroyed by corrupt judges and their cronies. The week before his death, he started a TikTok channel called “New America for the People”. I am dedicating my work for justice for the common person to Buddy Lynn. You can see my YouTube channel renamed in honor of Buddy here.
What to Watch for When Portfolio Recovery Associates Forces You to Litigate
A viewer on my YouTube channel, @LauraLynnHammett, said he was getting sued by Portfolio Recovery Associates and didn’t know what to do yet.
Here is my reply:
Look at my blog www.court-corruption.com. There are many stories about the CFPB orders against Portfolio Recovery Associates and free downloadable documents.
The key is that they win by default 90% of the time. Show up to court. Respond timely to their complaint. If you are allowed discovery, ask them to produce old account level documentation from the time your account was at zero until the present balance. Inspect their affidavits to determine if the person who is swearing has actual first-hand knowledge about whatever they are testifying about. Ask for a copy of the original credit contract. They could not produce a contract in my case and Judge Lee P. Rudofsky gave them a pass, but I hope the US Supreme Court looks at my case and overrules Judge Rudofsky and the Eighth. I AM NOT AN ATTORNEY. THIS IS NOT LEGAL ADVICE. I am sharing my own experience, and I did score a 162 on the LSAT, a low ivy league score, so I am confident I understand what I read and have good reasoning.
A Higher Law 