A non-profit legal organization in California has filed a lawsuit against a series of allegedly interconnected companies and the individuals involved in running those companies, including a debt buying and collection operation called Sue Ya Inc., claiming they violated the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act as well as state law in California for allegedly filing false proofs of service in an effort to obtain default judgments against consumers.
A copy of the complaint in the case of Bay Area Legal Aid v. Achievable Solutions Inc., A-United Attorney Service, Sue Ya Inc., Harris Law Group, Takashi Cheng, Kiona Tchan, James Crawford, and Halil Hasic can be accessed by clicking here.
Filing false proofs of service, known as sewer service, harms consumers by not informing them that a lawsuit has been filed and denying them an opportunity to defend themselves. In this case, process servers allegedly served four different consumers — including two in different locations 30 miles apart at the same time — in the same hour, and in another instance, allegedly drove 49 miles in five minutes to serve a consumer, according to the complaint.
The suit lays out the close ties between the organizations, including having the same individual defendants as officers of multiple companies, companies that shared addresses, and domains for one company that were allegedly registered by another. “These connections permit Defendants to perpetuate a scheme of mass fraud in debt collection actions while evading scrutiny for their actions,” according to the complaint.
Achievable Solutions allegedly filed 37 lawsuits in a five-month span in 2019 and 2020 in one California county — obtaining default judgments on all of the lawsuits it filed. All of the proofs of service were signed by the same individual, all alleged that substitute service was made, and all described the recipient of the summons the same way.
