Portfolio Recovery Associates

I have been hounded for years by this pond scum company.  The fact is, I am not even their debtor, they are looking for my son, who hasn't lived here for years.  I don't owe a nickle to anyone.  I will not give them the satisfaction of answering the phone when they call.  When I see their name on my caller I.D., I just let it ring until the answering machine kicks in.  They never leave a message.  They use a multitude of phone numbers to call you.  When I see a pattern of the same number calling day after day, I use the "block caller" feature of my telephone system, so that when they call they get a busy signal.  It now has become a game, and I'm winning......lol.  Although PRA is a very successful business, that doesn't negate the fact that they are nothing but pond scum.

I would take the lead like a woman just did---sueing them for 82 million dollars for harassing a non-debtor. Maybe if enough people did this, they could be sued out of existance.

Given his misreading of the law and his posture that litigation can be done in an easy afternoon, Steve would never get so far as to collect a hard-won judgment. More likely he takes the first cheap "nuisance value" settlement offer from the defense and hands over a dismissal.

Domestic debt collectors who worry about their exposure to attorneys general and the FTC generally do pay consumer litigants with a plausible case, however grudgingly. Their attorneys may drag feet and try to scare away determined plaintiffs, but thus far no agency has made me cry to a judge for a check. They absorb consumer law claims as a cost of business, so long as the claims are relatively few in proportion to the total number of accounts handled, and those claims don't hit their insurance plans too hard.

Yahoo News, being the aggregator that it is, also carried the article from Credit.com
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/woman-sues-debt-collector-wins-103051927.html
Woman sues debt collector, wins $83 million

It is interesting to read the comments people have posted, but due to the buggy nature of Yahoo's commenting software, sometimes posts appear more than once.

Within that article is this :

A Missouri jury ordered a debt buyer to pay nearly $83 million to a Kansas City woman it pursued for a $1,000 credit card bill she didn't owe, NPR affiliate KCUR reports.

The "KCUR reports" is a link : http://kcur.org/post/jury-awards-kc-woman-83-million-debt-collection-case

And there is far more interesting material in that article !!

In 2014 PRA reported total revenues of nearly $881 million and net income of $176.5 million. The punitive damage award amounts to nearly half the 2014 net income figure.

...

Chiala [ one of her lawyers ] said the credit-card debt in question was actually owed by a Kansas City, Kan., resident with a similar but not identical name. But even after Mejia told Portfolio Recovery that it had the wrong person, it persisted in trying to collect the debt from her, Chiala said.

“They denied it was clear that they had the wrong person,” she said.

McKeon, the spokesman for Portfolio Recovery, said that as soon as the company realized it had sued the wrong person, it dropped the case.

“Obviously those are facts that could have been contested at trial, but we didn’t get an opportunity to do that,” he said.

Debt buyers like Portfolio Recovery typically buy massive portfolios of debt from banks for pennies on the dollar. But the banks often don’t provide account documents with details on the debtors, leading to cases of mistaken identity.

“Long story short, they almost never have documents when they’re in the collection phase,” Chiala said. “They don’t have the credit card agreements, credit card applications, account notes, prior correspondence – all that stuff that helps distinguish one person from another.”

A majority of debt collection suits result in default judgments against the debtor because the debtor does not respond to the lawsuit or fails to show up in court. The debt buyer will then seek to collect on the judgment by garnishing the debtor’s wages or bank account.

After Portfolio Recovery sued Mejia, she sought advice from Legal Aid, which tried to get the lawsuit dismissed. That didn’t happen, and just before the first scheduled court date, Chiala’s law firm, Slough Connealy Irwin & Madden, stepped in to represent her. The firm promptly filed counterclaims under FDCPA and for malicious prosecution.

“It wasn’t her debt, it wasn’t her credit card account, it wasn’t anyone she knew,” Chiala said. “They had sued the wrong person.”

Rather than dismiss the case, however, Portfolio Recovery kept the suit going for 15 months. Chiala said that after it failed to comply with several discovery requests – the procedure by which parties in a case exchange evidence – Fahnestock found the company liable for both malicious prosecution and violations of FDCPA.

“I believe they thought that they could wear us out...,” Chiala said. “It takes a lot to get through these discovery battles. We had two big hearings on this, we filed four motions on this and it was a huge endeavor to get to that point. And so my belief is it was a strategy to just wear us down and wear us out.”

McKeon disputed that, saying the company thought it was on solid legal ground.

“The judge didn’t like the tack we took in dealing with discovery issues and said enough is enough, I find you guys liable, it’s over and we’re going right to damages,” McKeon said. “So we really didn’t get a chance to get into the substance of the case.”

===

I think that's one reason for the huge punitive damages. The lawyers for PRA intentionally failed to comply with the discovery phase. That's one thing that makes judges angry.

Now the question I have is, who are the lawyers who pulled this stunt ?
And who is the CEO and board of directors who refused to recognize the sheer stupidity of their arrogant position ?

Now the question I have is, who are the lawyers who pulled this stunt ? And who is the CEO and board of directors who refused to recognize the sheer stupidity of their arrogant position ?

A bunch of Wall Street sociopaths cut from the same cloth as those who caused the Crash of 2008.

What form do I file?

Thanks for posting, William.  Portfolio will probably get the amount reduced but what a victory.  I hope everyone in the country reads this story.  If nothing else it will reduce the power of these companies to intimidate individuals.

I thought about your questions and read the report a bit more closely.  You hit the nail on the head!  It's clear that they knew they had the wrong person but continued to pursue her hoping they would just wear down her will and get her to pay a debt she didn't owe!  Sick, sad bunch of jerks.

To establish a post office box, you'll need PS Form 1093.

To report a company for tax fraud, file IRS Form 3949-A.

To apply for a driver's license, see your local Department of Motor Vehicles for their form.

I could go on all day like this, but you haven't articulated a goal. Steve was beating his chest about his hamfisted lawsuits against collection agencies. He did this four years ago, by the way, and he's not bursting from obscurity just to reply to you.

If you want to sue someone without a lawyer, aka "pro se", it is not a matter of filling in a few bubbles on a form and waiting to get paid. You need to assess the risk to you, gather and review facts of your case, and be ready to express those facts clearly and at length. This is first done in a civil complaint, which is structured more or less like a school term paper to gently lead its readers toward the conclusions you want them to form.

No one can answer your vague question on that point, since the particular steps depend on which court you use. A federal question like an FDCPA claim is suited for federal court, but you can also start in a lower state court. There might be forms to get the action filed and started, and certainly a Summons form. In some places you might even find a civil complaint form with blanks for party names.

But sooner or later you get to the "essay section" like in school, and you are expected to provide the structure for your story. You are expected to respond to motions and file your own as the defense throws bricks at you. You are expected to respond to discovery and/or serve your own requests as needed. You will be communicating on and off the record with defense counsel, often about their attempts to settle or frighten you.

So again, this is a process, an adversarial kind, and if you're serious it's more work than Steve had purported. You might peruse the Nolo Press materials or your local court's guides (if any) for pro se litigants for further discussion.

What gets me is their maximum indifference to the issue at hand---the prolonged, willful and intentional criminal pursuit of a poor woman who had absolutely nothing to do with someone else's debt, despite evidence to the contrary.

I would love to see PRA's assets seized, including that of their CEO.

Their whole business model is centered around deception, the willful and totally unethical pursuit of people they know or should have known were innocent and their complete disregard for the law while doing it.   Any appeals court reviewing this case in an attempt by PRA to get the punitive damages reduced can't help but be shocked by their  intentional, blatant and callous disregard for the law in pursuing people who owed them nothing.    It's their arrogance that will trip them up in the end.  If this case doesn't "shock the conscience" of the court, no such case will.

This clowns called my tv!!! Im wachting my show and my tv say phoen call!! Im like no way bubbo. Comcast let's peeple call my tv!!

Take a deep breath, go into the medicine cabinet, and find the bottle your psychiatrist gave you and take those pills.  They will help.

Well at least if the TV was on, it could "answer" itself!

Three words, PRA.

Statue of Limitations.

Suck it.