Sued By Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC? Here's Help.
If you've been sued by Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC, there's a good chance you've never done business with anyone by that name. Portfolio Recovery Associates is a debt buyer, one of the largest in the country. It's owned by PRA Group, a publicly traded company headquartered in Norfolk, Virginia. The business is buying huge portfolios of old credit card accounts from the original lenders, usually for pennies on the dollar, and then collecting on what it bought, lawsuits included.
The name is easy to misread. "Portfolio Recovery Associates" sounds like an investment operation, and in a sense that's exactly what it is. The investment is your old debt, and the lawsuit is how they try to make the investment pay. Odds are, the only relationship between you and PRA is that your account ended up in a portfolio they bought.
Being served is frightening, but a lawsuit is a process with rules, not a verdict. You generally have thirty days to respond, and what you do with those days matters more than anything printed in the complaint. The rest of this page covers what PRA actually has to prove, what federal regulators have found about how it operates, the question of what happens if you really do owe the debt, and how to use your thirty days.
What PRA has to prove
A collection lawsuit that nobody answers is easy for the collector. The court enters an automatic judgment (called a default judgment), and nobody ever checks the paperwork. A defended case is a different thing entirely, because the rules of procedure and evidence now apply in earnest. I think of the whole industry as a square peg being forced into a round hole. The square peg is the mass collection practice these companies want to run through the courts, and the round hole is the court system, with procedures the court has to follow and rights that you have. Those procedures were never designed for lawsuits filed by the hundreds of thousands, and they only protect you if you show up and use them.
The first thing PRA has to prove sounds almost too basic. It has to prove it owns your account. That takes a documented paper trail from the original bank all the way down to PRA (lawyers call it chain of title), and without that trail, they cannot prove they own the debt. Then PRA has to back up the numbers with records a court is legally allowed to consider, which is harder for a debt buyer than most people assume, because the records were created by somebody else entirely. One of those evidence rules went all the way to California's Supreme Court in a case bearing this very collector's name, Meza v. Portfolio Recovery Associates (it concerns the sworn-statement shortcut debt buyers often use at trial instead of bringing a live witness).
The regulators have been here twice
You don't have to take my word for any of this. Portfolio Recovery Associates has been through federal enforcement twice in under a decade.
- In 2015, the CFPB found in a consent order that PRA had been collecting debts without verifying the underlying documentation, relying on robo-signed affidavits (sworn statements signed by employees claiming "personal knowledge" of accounts they never reviewed), and pursuing debts too old to sue on. The order included roughly $19 million in consumer refunds, an $8 million penalty, and a stop to collection on more than $3 million of debts.
- In 2023, the CFPB came back. The new order addressed allegations that PRA was still collecting debts it couldn't substantiate, suing (and threatening to sue) without the required documentation, and filing cases outside the statute of limitations. It came to roughly $12 million in consumer redress and a $12 million civil penalty, and the CFPB's own announcement called the company a repeat offender.
Those findings and allegations are the CFPB's, and none of them decide your case. But you're allowed to notice the pattern. A company that has twice been cited over the documentation behind its collections is now asking a court to take its documentation on faith. When you respond, it doesn't get to.
What if I actually owe the debt?
This is the question that stops most people from defending themselves, but don't let it! Nobody plans their way into default on a debt; in fact few things are more stressful than having to let that happen. Don't flog yourself for running into financial difficulties, and don't lie down for somebody else to do it. Something happened, a layoff, an illness, a divorce, a business that didn't survive, an income that didn't enable you to keep up with expenses, and the account went unpaid because it had to. Feeling bad about that is human. Letting the feeling talk you out of your rights is a gift to a debt buyer that does not deserve to get a gift.
In my view, PRA holds no moral high ground here. It paid next to nothing for your account, betting that the difference between what it paid and what a court might award would turn somebody's worst year into its windfall. You didn't set out to profit from any of this. They did, on a spreadsheet, in bulk. So if this lawsuit is going to hand somebody a windfall either way, I don't see why it should be them. Make them prove it. Make them comply with procedures. Raise the proper legal objections.
The thirty-day clock
From the day you're served, you generally have thirty days to file a written response with the court. Miss that window, and PRA can ask for the automatic judgment described above, which can mean a levy on your bank account (they can take the money directly), garnished wages if you have a job, and a lien on your house. Respond in time, and the proving becomes PRA's problem.
A few pages on this site will help you do it right. I've also written a step-by-step page on what to do first when Portfolio Recovery sues you, which is the place to start if you're holding a summons right now. How to Calculate Your Deadline for Responding to a Summons walks through the count, which is more particular than people expect. Top 5 Mistakes by Consumers Who Get Sued covers the unforced errors I see most often. And the FAQs answer the questions people are usually too embarrassed to ask.
When you call, you get me
If you'd rather put this in professional hands, this is familiar ground for me. I've defended Californians against Portfolio Recovery Associates in more than a hundred cases. Here's how I work: When you call, you get me. I do not hand your case to an associate, a paralegal, or a telemarketer. The consultation is free, it takes fifteen minutes, and you book it directly through this site.
I can't promise you an outcome, and nobody honest can. I can promise the best defense available. I can promise that you can offload the process to me (if I take your case), so that whatever can be done is being done while you get on with the rest of your life. It's sort of like going to sleep knowing your alarm clock is set. You've got a placeholder your brain trusts, and the night takes care of itself. Until then, those thirty days are my problem to manage, not yours, and so is the rest of the case.