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Jury awards $250K plus $82M in punitives to woman sued over someone else's credit card bill

A lawsuit over a $1,130.14 credit-card bill she didn’t owe resulted in a jury verdict of over $250,000, plus $82 million in damages, for a Kansas City, Missouri, woman this week.

“The jury issued a verdict that it thought would get this company’s attention,” said attorney Gina Chiala, who represented Maria Guadalupe Mejia Alcantara in the Jackson County case.

A spokesman for the defendant, Portfolio Recovery Associates, promised an appeal of what he described as an “outlandish” verdict, the Kansas City Star reports.

“We hope and expect the judge will set aside this inappropriate award and we plan to file motions to make the request formally in the very near term,” Michael McKeon of National Portfolio told the newspaper. “Any fair reading of the facts of this case makes plain that a verdict of this size is not justice by any means, and cannot stand.”

Many defendants in such cases aren’t able to find a lawyer to represent them, Chiala said , but Alcantara initially got help from Kansas City Legal Aid. The man who had actually racked up the credit card debt she was being held accountable for lived across the state line in Kansas City, Kansas, a legal aid lawyer tried, to no avail, to explain to the creditor.

Portfolio Recovery wasn’t able to confirm that the real debtor had a different name than Alcantara, Chiala told the Star, because the company didn’t have all of the account records.

Her firm, Slough Connealy Irwin & Madden, took on the defense of the case a little over two years ago, filing counterclaims for violation of the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act and malicious prosecution.

The case was decided by a judge in Alcantara’s favor last October, and the judge also found that the defendant had engaged in bad-faith conduct and discovery abuse, the Star reports. A subsequent jury trial held to determine damages concluded on Monday.

If the verdict is upheld on appeal, half will go to Missouri Attorney General’s office, which would deposit the award in a victim compensation fund, and the other half would go to Alcantara and her counsel, the newspaper reports.

“I did not owe this company any money. My husband and I were already struggling to just to keep our children fed and the lights on,” said Alcantara in a written statement. “The lawsuit terrified me.”

Chiala said the attorney general’s office received 88 similar complaints about Portfolio Recovery between 2006 and 2014.