Sued By Crown Asset Management, LLC? Here's Help.
Crown Asset Management, LLC is a Georgia debt buyer that has purchased hundreds of portfolios of charged-off consumer debt, credit cards, auto loans, personal loans, and online-lender accounts. It keeps almost nothing in-house. Collection, and the lawsuits, are farmed out to a network of agencies and law firms, which in California has included Mandarich Law Group.
The paper problem
A defended collection case usually comes down to proof, and the first thing a debt buyer must prove is that it owns your account. That is harder than it sounds. Debt buyers purchase defaulted accounts by the portfolio, on spreadsheets, sometimes through more than one intermediate owner. The specific assignment of your account is often missing or defective — and without it, they cannot prove they own the debt.
California adds its own teeth here. A debt buyer suing in this state has to possess and plead specific documentation about your account, including the complete chain of title, meaning every company that has owned your account since the original creditor (the Fair Debt Buying Practices Act, Civil Code section 1788.50 and following). Those requirements are not self-executing, though. Somebody has to know what buttons to press and switches to flip. The whole industry is, in my view, a square peg being forced into a round hole. The square peg is the bulk collection business these companies want to run through the courts. The round hole is a court system built to decide cases one at a time, under rules of evidence, with rights on your side of the table. In a defended case, that square peg tends to get stuck.
California courts have already seen what happens when Crown's paperwork gets tested. In Chambers v. Crown Asset Management (2021), the Court of Appeal refused to let Crown push a consumer's case into arbitration, because its only evidence that an arbitration agreement was ever mailed was a bank employee's declaration that company records showed it, and nobody actually laid the legal foundation for those records. Sworn statements about records nobody proves up are the soft spot of this whole industry, and that's precisely the kind of proof a defended case makes them produce.
And if part of you hesitates to fight because the debt was real once, look at what actually happened. Crown Asset Management bought your account, or claims to have bought it, for next to nothing, on a bet that nobody would make it prove anything. In my view, a company running that bet has no special claim on your guilt. You didn't choose this course. They did. Make them prove it.
Use the thirty days
From the day you're served, you generally have thirty days to file a written response with the court. If nothing gets filed, Crown Asset Management can ask for an automatic judgment against you (called a default judgment), and with a judgment they can levy your bank account, meaning they take the money directly, garnish your wages if you have a job, or put a lien on your house. Responding is what makes everything above matter, because a defended case is where the proof gets tested.
Two reads that will help. Here's how to calculate your deadline, which is more particular than people expect. And the top five mistakes people make when they get sued is five minutes well spent before you decide anything.
Let it be my problem
If you'd rather hand this off, the consultation is free, it takes fifteen minutes, and you speak with me directly. No intake screener, no telemarketer. Although the outcome can't be guaranteed, you can offload the process, so you know that whatever can be done is being done while you go about the other things in your life. It's sort of like the alarm clock by your bed. Once it's set, your brain stops holding the time, because the clock is holding it. It'll go off when it goes off.