Virgin Media is a fraudulent rogue business: my story

[vmisascam]

So I waited for my contract to end before cancelling to avoid any additional fees. Never missed a payment despite ridiculous price hikes. In late April I called the cancellations team and after being on hold for 4 hours I finally get transferred to an agent who claims she has disconnected my services. I ask: "can you confirm this is being recorded?" she says "yes sir, you don't need to do anything else and within 30 days everything's cancelled"

Suddenly notice there's a £65 charge on my DD for the next month - I call and have another conversation which goes exactly as above "they say it's cancelled and they will refund me once they investigate"

fast-forward: every single other day from that day today I am harassed by VM texts and e-mails claiming I cancelled direct debit and there's no evidence that I have cancelled - I CALL ANOTHER TWO TIMES and have the same call, I ask: "can you confirm my services are cancelled from last time and this is being recorded?" she says "yes sir, you don't need to do anything else" then officially it shows nothing is cancelled and that they're going to report my account to debt collection services.

If this isn't resolved within 24 hours it is unfortunate for everyone involved but I will seek to make this a public case:

Unfortunately for VM, my partner studied contract law in the US and is a partner @ big law. What we're going to do: get a FOI request asking for my recorded phone calls from the VM team, submit these as evidence and POTENTIALLY form a class-action for wrongful & negligent consumer theft, waste of time compensation, resources and potential harassment. 

I am out of principal not going to write a letter to cancel the services when I've been told FOUR TIMES my services are cancelled and a total of 15 hours on hold with a psychotically incompetent company.

[Anonymous]

calm down and take a breath, US law is pointless here, Class Actions aint a thing here either and you cant FOI a private company in the UK and the whole country knows how useless VM are, papers wont be interested again.

all this aside, we can all appreciate the horrendous VM customer service but silly threats wont sort it,

I managed to cancel all 3 of my accounts recently (2 by phone 1 by Whatsapp) allow a mod here to investigate, it may be something utterly silly is happening/not being actioned correctly.

Any overpayments if in the wrong will be refunded back to you, hang tight and help will be on the way

[jem101]

OK first things first, if you just wanted to come on here and rant then that's absolutely fine. If however you want a resolution and proper compensation for your inconvenience then there are ways and means of going about it.

You won't be making a FOI request because they only apply to public bodies and VM is a private company, what you probably mean is a Data Subject Access Request and this is the link to the VM webpage, where you can start the process. Secondly you won't be starting any class action suits as there is no such thing in English Law, there is a similar concept but really not the same thing at all, and the onus is on you to actively find other parties to join in with you and share the risk.

So just forget any pointless threats of legal action or going public on social media (already been done and dusted), VM have seen it all before and got the teeshirt. It will achieve exactly nothing and get you nowhere.

There is a chance that the forum team here can intervene and negotiate a suitable resolution but if not then this is the path you need to go down.

a) Make a formal complaint to VM, the link to the page to do this is here. Demand that they immediately cancel your service, refund ever penny that you paid them after the first thirty days notice was up and add on a little extra (let's say £50-£70) for the inconvenience and stress this has caused you.

b) Continue to pay them, yes I know it sticks in the maw a bit, but they absolutely will trash your credit rating and hand the whole lot off onto a firm of debt collectors, and you could probably do without the extra hassle.

c) Wait to get a response to your complaint. More than likely it'll be a fob off or some derisory offer, they may simply not respond at all or just close it - doesn't matter.

d) Reject their offer and demand a 'deadlock letter', they may make a better off or not. They may send you the deadlock letter or maybe not, again doesn't really matter.

e) If you get the letter or if not, eight weeks after you raised the complaint, you make a formal submission to the industry adjudicator CISAS, link to the website with a big red 'Make a Complaint' button is here. Their ruling is binding on VM and costs you nothing at all, VM have to pay all the cost of the adjudication. In your submission, spell out exactly what happened and when, what was said, what was promised, what actually happened? In the section asking about what you want them to do for you, you ask them to instruct VM to immediately release you from contract without further costs, refund in full all payments made after the original 30 day notice period, plus an additional fee of say £150-£200 for the extra inconvenience and failure to properly deal with your complaint and if necessary failure to provide the deadlock letter.

f) Make a summary complaint to OFCOM about your treatment and VM's failure to properly process cancellation requests as per OFCOM code of conduct which VM signed up to. OFCOM don't get directly involved in individual cases but do collate the numbers and figures and can give VM a proverbial kicking.

Of course, you ultimately do have recourse to the Courts but the first thing they will want to know is has both parties followed the proper procedures and made every effort to resolve this first, if not then it's likely to just get thrown out.

VM can be a dysfunctional bureaucratic nightmare and the only way is to fight bureaucracy with more bureaucracy.

[Ryan_N]

Hi vmisascam, 

Thank you for your post and welcome to the forums. 

I am sorry to hear of the experience you've had whilst attempting to cancel down your account. I fully appreciate that this has been frustrating for you - with that, it's also something we can fix. Whatever route you choose to take this down is entirely up to yourself, as no-one here is able to stop you from doing so. A lot of great information has been given by @jem101 (thank you for that).

If after the private message I am going to send you - you remain unhappy all the relevant information can be found above. But I assure you I will look to get this resolved right away 🙂 

Cheers, 

Ryan. 

[vmisascam]

This is a very nice response thanks - huge shame that it's 500x more competent that my dealings with the actual staff. Really appreciate it.

For the record I complained using that same link 10 days before writing this post - and their response? 'please call our team using the number on our website to cancel your services' - genuinely almost designed to make your blood pressure go up - after telling them I've already done that three times they said 'there's a balance on your account that needs to be cleared' - how is this not even worse than a backstreet biker gang?

In this economy for a multibillion pound company to take money when they've told consumers over the phone THREE TIMES they've cancelled their account and no money will come after 30 days and they confirm it over a recorded phone call is outrageously sinister, and fraudulent - imagine if I was an old lady who doesn't have good sight or a support system around them and they take virgin for their word THREE SEPERATE times over THREE SEPERATE phone calls? It genuinely borders on something you'd see on a show detailing rogue businesses in a seaside town as opposed to a billion pound company - I shudder to think the amount of the millions of pounds and people who have had payments made to VM purely out of incompetence-by-design so as to make leaving the atrocious services as hard as possible. 

Utterly pathetic.

[vmisascam]

Thank you to Ryan_N for resolving this for me - if only the rest of the 15 people I must have spoken to over 40 hours and 3 months were as incredibly efficient and empathetic as Ryan, VM would be a 10x better company. Than you Ryan!

[Ryan_N]

Really appreciate you taking the time to leave this - more than happy to have helped. 

Take care 🙂 

Cheers, 

Ryan.