Being charged for calls not made

[PatW1]

Hi,

It appears I'm now being charged for calls I'm not making on the landline phone. This has started with my June bill and it appears to be happening with my July bill.

Usage Charges - June - 37 calls totalling 3 minutes 46 seconds - £7.10

So on average a call of 6 seconds each time - which doesn't make any sense.

Usage Charges - July - 41 calls totalling 5 minutes 2 seconds - £8.12

On an average a call of 7 seconds each time - again, that doesn't make any sense.

I have not used the phone anywhere near that number of times. The landline is rarely used.

Can anyone advise what can be done to rectify this and refund these charges?

Thanks,

[Reece_MH]

Hi @PatW1,

Thanks for the update with this, sorry to hear that no fault has been found that could explain these charges. Unfortunately, we're unable to lower the itemisation limit on your account.

In regards to the charges, I'm going to private message you to discuss this further.

Cheers,

[goslow]

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@Reece_MH wrote:

Hi @PatW1,

Thanks for the update with this, sorry to hear that no fault has been found that could explain these charges. Unfortunately, we're unable to lower the itemisation limit on your account.

In regards to the charges, I'm going to private message you to discuss this further.

Cheers,

---

Very interesting. Is this a recent change Reece_MH? It has always been possible in the past for customers to request full itemisation free of charge to be included on bills (but it has to be requested as 50p was always the default). It is even mentioned in the 'Everyday Call Charges' guide on page 1 as a free add-on

https://www.virginmedia.com/callcosts

If VM won't provide full itemisation on bills, and also won't provide detail of call details within the sub 50p limit, the customer has no way of cross-checking that billing is being correctly applied.

[Reece_MH]

Hi @goslow,

Apologies for the confusion with this. We're unable to request an itemisation of any previous bills unless there is a Court Order in place. We can't specifically lower the itemisation amount, to a specific amount but we're able to amend the account to provide fully itemised future bills.

As @PatW1's post was referring to charges already incurred, it's something that would've been discussed further in my PM with them as an option that we can offer.

Hope that clears things up 🙂

Cheers, 

[goslow]

Thanks for clarifying. I had read PatW1's request at #10 on the public forum as requesting the 50p limit be removed for future billing to avoid this happening again in future as I had suggested that at #7.

Hopefully PatW1 will gain the necessary information via DSAR to identify what the phantom charges relate to (although I don't think a customer should really have to go to those lengths to find out what they are being billed for if there is any uncertainty about call charges).

[Reece_MH]

Hi @goslow,

No problem at all. Apologies on my behalf, looks like I misinterpreted the question. Unfortunately, there is only so much we're able to investigate on our end in regards to the call charges.

We're doing everything we can with @PatW1 to ensure we identify the reasons for these calls/charges being incurred.

Thanks,