My mother has been with Virgin mobile for a while. Sadly, she has early-stage dementia and is unable to remember her password. She had been on PAYG, but as she is a care-home resident (and therefore shielded) topping up became an issue, so we switched online to a £7 per month contract just before Xmas, with a Direct Debit set up.
Since then, my mother’s services have been barred, even though her account is currently over £30 in credit. The Direct Debit, due to have been taken on the 5th Jan was not collected. We have managed to ascertain that this is because her credit limit is, for some reason, set to £0. Each time we have tried to sort this out we cannot progress beyond the initial stage as we do not know the password, with the result that my mother, isolated in a care home, has had to rely purely on incoming calls and is unable to call anyone herself.
I have tried to sort this out with Customer Services several times, telling them that I have Power of Attorney, but as soon as we get to the password stage, they just impassively tell us we can't progress any further. I have tried to explain that we don't know her password, and nor does she, but half the time the representative doesn't seem to understand this and we go back to "Do you know the password?" or "Is she there with you?" - NO - as I keep trying to explain, she's in a locked-down nursing home. I did finally make some progress with one of your call centre staff on the 6th, who seemed to understand what Power Of Attorney actually means, and who advised me to send the above information to an address in Sunderland, which I did on the same day. Despite repeated calls to follow this up, I was constantly told that this paperwork had not been applied to her account, and to give it more time. On chasing it up again yesterday, the representative told me it should instead have been sent to Manchester, and that I need to start this process all over again. I am deeply disinclined to do this.
We did send a complaint about this a month or so ago via the online complaints form but haven’t even received acknowledgement of it. In good faith, I sent proof of our power of attorney to (it turns out) the wrong address as instructed by one of Virgin's own staff in an attempt to sort this out. Meanwhile, my elderly and increasingly confused and isolated mother is reliant on people calling her because her only means of calling out is unavaliabe to her. We need this to be sorted out, and soon as I really can't face another repetitive and futile hour on the phone.
