The 17th Private Law Chamber of the Court of Justice of São Paulo (TJ/SP) decided that after the five-year prescriptive period, it is possible to collect a debt, as long as it is not through the initiation of legal proceedings.
The case concerns a consumer relationship, in which the Judges understood that the debt does not cease to exist after the expiration of the prescriptive period for filing a legal collection action, which is why they did not extinguish the debt or even remove the consumer’s name from the defaulters’ register.
