Virgin Media kept sending me false bills and ruined my credit report!

[jingcui6]

I had a nightmare with Virgin Media trying to close my account and get back my money for over one year in 2019 to 2020.

I terminated my contract with Virgin Media by phone on April 20, 2019. 

But instead of closing my account as they should have, they left it open and continue to deduct monthly payment from my bank account using Direct Debit for another 3 months(total of £105).

I cancelled the Direct Debit in July and raised multiple complaints on July 18, Sep 04, Nov 22, Dec 03, and Dec 10. Every time after a long waiting and explaining to a different operator, he/she would apologised and acknowledge the mysterious error that they can’t explain and promised to terminate and refund my account immediately, which never happened. 

On Jan 3, 2020, I received another email from Virgin Media asking me to pay a bill of £128.34. So decided to raised a complaint to CEDR. (case no: 588054). 

It wasn’t really a dispute, as both VM and I agreed that my account should have been closed long ago and the £105 to be refunded. The problem is they never executed it.

On Feb 14, 2020, I accepted Virgin’s settlement offer to close my account and refund £105 that it deduced from me after my account should have been terminated.

However, Virgin Media did the “promise something but do the opposite” trick again. This time it even hired a collections company to send me a letter asking me to pay £92.09 on March 19, 2020.

After re-opening the CEDR complaint again and many hours wasted in explaining, I received the refund cheque of £105 from Virgin Media in May. I thought this torment had ended there. 

But in 2023 I did a credit check and found that Virgin Media had stained my credit report for 3 months arrear of the bill that was generated completely by their mistake. This is outrageous!

I would like to request VM to take off my arrear history immediately and apologise to me.

[jingcui6]

I had a similar experience with VM.

https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/Virgin-Media-kept-sending-me-false-...

[Adri_G]

Hi, jungcui6.
Thanks for taking the time to create your first post on our help forums and for joining the VM community, a warm welcome. 🙂

We're very sorry to read of this experience with the bill disputes, complaints raised and the issues caused regarding your credit score, this is definitely not the standard we aim for and we'd love to share our knowledge and help in the best way we can.

In general, a VM account can be closed once the services have disconnected/deactivated.
When raising a disconnection request it takes 30 days to action this, which means we also need to bill you up to the disconnection date as your last day with us.
This happens with the final bill we issue one day after the disconnection date, in case you had cancelled your Direct Debit before this bill came out this could have caused issues with closing your account (we need to clear any remaining balance too so we close this).

Of course this does not mean you're at fault based on what followed and if we provided a resolution which was not actioned, for this we can support you by reviewing the info and data to understand more and resolve this matter.

As we will require a closer look into what's happened so we can assist, I'll send you a PM here shortly to do that.
Please, check the top right-hand side of our page to find a little white envelope.
Click on this and you'll see my message.

[Matthew_ML]

Hey jingcui6, thank you for reaching out and I am sorry to hear about this.

I can see my colleague has replied to you and has sent you a PM.

Please do reply back and will she take a look into this for. Cheers 

[jingcui6]

Thank you for the explanation. However it doesn’t apply to my case. 

I called VM in March 2019 to terminate my account on April 20, 2019. This has been confirmed by several operators who spoke to me in my later phone complaints. VM over-deducted from my account for 3 months way past my termination date until I realized this and cancelled my Direct Debit in July 2019. VM acknowledged that it was due to their technical error and promised to refund the £105 to me several times, but kept failing to do this simple task.

[Adri_G]

Hi, jingcui6.
Thanks for sharing more, I've messaged you privately and waiting for your reply so we can look into this together.
Cheers,

[jingcui6]

Hi Adri,

After a few rounds of private messages I was prompted that I’ve reached the limit of private messages and cannot send any more now. So i’ll move our conversation here.

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Adri_G:

Thanks for providing the info to help me pass the account security, Jing.

I am in now, from the notes I can see that you previously chased up for this account to be closed back in Dec. 2019 and early 2020.

I can also see that we've managed to close the account after we processed your request for a refund due to receiving bills incorrectly and then we also collected your equipment back and closed the account.

I am sorry as this does not justify the reason for your credit report showing you in 3 months arrears currently, however we have ways to help.

Can I ask if you if you've previously logged a dispute directly with the credit reference agencies, Equifax or Experian? 
This makes it easier for the credit file amendment team too as all of the information is visible to them.

Equifax: Equifax.co.uk

Experian: Experian.co.uk

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jingcui6: 

I logged a report to Equifax. However I got my credit score from a 3rd party website, not directly from them, they might not respond to my ticket. The ticket number is 231107-2699329 FYI.

I havne’t logged anything to Experian yet.

[jingcui6]

Now I’m getting this prompt instead. 

——————————

Correct the highlighted errors and try again.

• Your post has been changed because invalid HTML was found in the message body. The invalid HTML has been removed. Please review the message and send the message when you are satisfied.

——————————

I made sure there’s no HTML in the text but it still doesn’t allow me to send the message. Could you fix this bug so i can keep using private messages? 

[Adri_G]

Hi, jingcui6.
Thanks for the reply and sorry to see you're facing issues with replying to the PMs I've sent you.
I'd like to kindly ask you to delete/remove all the account related info and our conversation you've posted above publicly please, as this is against the house rules.

Also, try logging out of the forums and back in as you should be able to PM me directly when you do this and let me know how you get on.
I'll wait for your private reply too, cheers.