Virgin Media fined £28m for preventing contract cancellations
Virgin Media fined £28m for repeatedly preventing customers from cancelling contracts. "Deliberate call-dropping" tactics, customers put on hold "for no reason". Commission scheme "effectively encouraged" and rewarded abuses. No exec fined/charged for carefully designed scam to fleece customers.
AJ 🦋8Their customer “service” is a toxic hellscspe.
Robot Logic7£28m is a bargain price to ensure they can keep scamming people for way more.
falconer59.bsky.social5Yup that tracks and the longer you are a customer the worse your deal.
bezzerboy.bsky.social4The ‘field operations’ system too is a shambles. I took Virgin to the Ombudsman last year for a lengthy and honestly, farcical at times failure to provide a full fibre connection. I won compensation of well over £400 for their lies and incompetence.
Chris Midgley2Don't try leaving by phoning customer services, you get phonecalls offerings you special offers to stay. The only way is to send a recorded letter telling them you are leaving in accordance with their terms and conditions.
Simon the realist2They have been charging me fraudulently for a phone line for years... which they installed 'free forever' then started charging me. It doesn't even work. (I'm not the only one... but I failed to get it in writing so they can say what they want and then lie about it. Absolute scum company)
We experienced this: totally outrageous. And we eventually just cancelled our payments - and I think they threatened us with debt collectors? This fine feels way too low.
Austin14I assume the fine is far lower than the money they extorted illegally from customers. Cost of doing business and they’ll write it off against profits.
Sean Jones KC8I had a similar experience. At one point they told me they wouldn’t process my cancellation unless I told them which provider I was moving to, at which point I became a little short.
Uitlander6I would really like to see VM be forced to pay compensation to their customers, and/or forced to lower their prices. My package is going up to £90 this month and I am trying to gather the mental strength to start the horrible contract renewal negotiations before that 40% hike hits.
niallb-1966.bsky.social6When I left them a good few years ago I literally got into a shouting match with the call centre bod, who kept shouting ‘you’re going to Sky, aren’t you!’ (I wasn’t). As you say, this feels very conservative in terms of the fine.
Sandra5Same happened to us - despite having the evidence that we had indeed cancelled our contract. What it served to do was ensure we never returned.
Kate4The dreaded Virgin retentions department.
Virgin Media fined £28m for preventing customers from cancelling contracts. Ofcom levies largest-ever consumer protection fine after finding firm deliberately mishandled millions of phone calls. www.theguardian.com/media/2026/j...
I parted ways with VM when they bought up TIVO. They killed my 1st generation TIVO player by turning off the programme data download, and expected me to take out a VM contract to replace it.
cjd66.bsky.social1BT used to do it, trying to cancel BT Sport on the phone was near impossible - so I wrote a letter with all the account details and instructions to cancel and sent it "signed for". I got a letter back from BT confirming cancellation within a few days.
Helen Monty1Sky back charged me for 6 months when I cancelled and refused to pay me the money back as “it will be held for future bills” of which there will be none. Hours of phone calls later and they told me they’d processed the refund and that money has never arrived.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... So lets be clear. Ofcom/the treasury gets £28M because I and another 1/60 of the UK population were dicked about by this sh!t show of a company when I left because the service work only when it felt like it and we get nothing.
Jonathan Creaser M0XXJ3Yeah, how utterly laughable 😁 I had an absolutely chronic time trying to deal with their customer service team a few months ago. I put in a GDPR request for the recording of the conversation. I'm keeping it for posterity and may release bits of it for entertainment purposes 🤣
Michael Seaword2So I wasn’t alone in finding them unbelievably bad to deal with.
captain-mushroom.bsky.social1BT and OpenReach no better. In my case the full fibre connection installed to the pole I can see from my window that I watched and chatted to the techs, doesn't exist after 1 1/2 hours with CS and pole # given. Then blithely offered fibre to cabinet. I said gimme 80 feet of the cable I'll DIY.
