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Where did I go wrong?

johnpdunkley
Joining in

9 months to cancel a Virgin line and no refund

It took 9 months and CEDR to cancel my contract with Virgin who paid £250 compensation but refused to refund the 9 months of charges:-
I had a land line with Virgin Media [MOD EDIT: REMOVED] for many years but moved 6/1/21 to an area that Virgin did nor service so wanted to cancel my service. I tried to do this using the online system but it did not support cancellation. I tried using the online chat function but tyhey kept me waiting until I lost the will to live. I emailed Virgin who insisted that I phone their retention team. I tried to phone the retention team and sat in a phone queue until my patience was exhausted. I lodged a complaint through the Virgin Complaints process and asked to be contactred by email. Virgin phoned me while I was driving and left a message asking me to call them. I tried and sat in another phone queue for a while. I kept emailing with no success so took the case to CEDR (meanwhile, Virgin were still debiting the monthly bills for as service that I was not receiving). I received an offer from Virgin as follows:- "£250.00 compensation, as a gesture of goodwill....Cancel your services free of charge. Once again, please accept my apologies for the inconvenience caused as a result of the delay in cancelling your services". It was now 29/7/21 so I reluctantly accepted expecting the money to be credited to my account. Nothing happened so I followed up and Virgin told me that it was company policy to only offer refunds by cheque. I eventually received a cheque for £250 but Virgin were still debiting my account £25.85 per month. I received approximately 10 calls from the Virgin Retention team asking if there was anything they could do to retain my business. My account was cancelled in Sept but my money was not refunded and Virgin does not accept complaints from cancelled accounts so I went back to CEDR and raised a further complaint. Virgin challenged this under CEDR terms and conditions saying that a complaint cannot be accepted if it relates to a previous complaint. I responded saying that Virgin had failed to properly deal with the previous complaint but CEDR upheld Virgin's position. I shall also be lodging a complaint against CEDR

 

 [MOD EDIT: Personal and private information has been removed from this post. Please do not post personal or private information in your public posts. Please review the Forum Guidelines]

3 REPLIES 3

John_GS
Forum Team
Forum Team

Hi johnpdunkley

 

Thanks for posting and welcome to the community.

 

If you've raised a complaint through us, gone to CISAS as exhausted the complaints process with us and thus seeked independent resolution, this resolution from CISAS is binding on both sides.

 

Best,

John_GS
Forum Team


Need a helpful hand to show you how to make a payment? Check out our guide - How to pay my Virgin Media bill

goslow
Alessandro Volta

@johnpdunkley wrote:

<snip>

It took 9 months and CEDR to cancel my contract with Virgin who paid £250 compensation but refused to refund the 9 months of charges:-
<snip>


This is more of an account management topic rather than home phone but ...

Your post is a bit hard to follow. If I have understood correctly, you wanted to leave VM in Jan '21. You tried to do this by phone but failed to speak to VM. You also emailed, used chat and submitted a complaint. VM failed to cancel and kept charging you £25.85 p.m. for 9 months until Sept '21. Somewhere along the way (with further delay) VM paid you £250 after a CISAS judgement.

So, you either paid x9 payments at £25.85 = £232.65 and they have been covered by the £250 payment meaning you were not compensated for any inconvenience caused by VM's delay. Alternatively, you have been compensated £250 for the inconvenience and have not received a rebate on the x9 erroneous payments.

If you have won a CISAS judgement and then VM have appealed to CISAS and won against any further claims, it's a bit hard to see where else you can go with this other than back to CISAS via their own complaints processes (which is an unusual twist to the normal topics which come up on here).

As far as where did you go wrong, the only two means of cancelling AIUI are by phoning in or writing. Your post mentions emailing and chat then a complaint to VM so am not sure as to when you actually cancelled via one of those two approved routes.

Probably a decision for you about how much time/effort you want to invest in chasing it up with CISAS versus any further financial return which might result.

That's pretty much it. I'm starting to think that it's an Admin **bleep**-up in that they cancelled wef Sept rather than Jan. Otherwise they've gone to a lot of trouble and bad publicity to hand on to a lousy £250