A CFPB order quotes PRA’s own VP: 90% of cases are default judgments.

Take the case number off the front page and check it against that court’s own docket. A clerk can tell you whether the case exists. Do not use a phone number printed on the papers to check. A member here describes being sued without knowing it, because the papers went to an address she had not lived at for years while her current address sat in the plaintiff’s own documents. Papers you never received are still a lawsuit, and a default judgment follows the same way. If the case is real, the deadline printed on it is running now.

PRA Group, Inc. is the listed parent in Norfolk, Virginia. Portfolio Recovery Associates, LLC is the operating business that buys the accounts and files the suits, and it is the name that appears on a complaint. Read the caption on your own papers. Whoever is named there is the plaintiff, and the plaintiff has to prove it owns your account.

The 2015 order records the company’s own vice president saying 90% of its cases were default judgments, and it records that consumers responded to fewer than six percent of the suits PRA filed. Those figures describe 2012 and 2013, and the company publishes no current ones. What it does still publish is this, in the 2025 annual report: it generates a significant portion of its revenue by collecting on judgments granted by courts in lawsuits filed against its customers. Answering is what takes you out of that number.

Yes, and the clearest recent example is Wright v. Portfolio Recovery Associates, decided by the Colorado Supreme Court in May 2026. PRA sued for $671.29 and attached a bill of sale, two statements and an affidavit from a records custodian. The asset schedule attached to the bill of sale was blank where the account number and the balance should have been. The court held that the bill of sale showed PRA bought some debt from the bank, not that it bought this consumer’s debt, and that the affidavit could not stand in for the documentary proof the Colorado statute requires. That is Colorado law, not your state’s. The question it asks travels: do their documents name your account?

We publish no settlement percentage, because no sourced figure exists for this company and the percentages on other sites are invented. What the record does tell you is where their weight is. The CFPB found in 2023 that they collected on debts they had not substantiated and sued without possessing the documentation. A member here describes a case for more than $30,000 that was dismissed after a readable copy of the contract never arrived. If you negotiate, do it in writing, say in every message that you do not acknowledge the debt, and file your answer on the day it is due whether or not a deal has landed.

We cannot tell you about your own file, but you are not alone in the question. Attempts to collect a debt not owed is the largest complaint category filed with the CFPB about this company: 19,762 of the 64,708 complaints on record as of 25 August 2026. Those are consumer allegations, not findings. Federal law gives you thirty days from their first written contact to dispute the debt in writing, and if you do, they have to stop collecting until they verify it. Send it in writing and keep the copy.

No. It is a licensed debt buyer, its parent is listed on the NASDAQ, and it files lawsuits every week. A regulator suing a company is not a ban on that company. The CFPB has acted against this one twice, in 2015 and again in 2023, and called it a repeat offender the second time. It kept operating through both.