CREDIT SCORE RUINED - ATTENTION ANYONE WITH SIMILAR EXPERIENCE
ATTENTION ANYONE WHO HAVE HAD THEIR CREDIT SCORE RUINED BY VIRGIN MEDIA Personally I'm completely sick of faceless, greedy companies doing whatever they want without any accountability. I'm looking for anyone who has had their credit score affected by Virgin Media. Just a quick background I'd been a loyal customer to Virgin Media for many years, giving them thousands of pounds over that period. I needed to move house, so I cancelled my account with them, and after hours and hours of chasing them on various support channels trying to cancel my account (and yes, they make it deliberately difficult to do) I was assured by one of the support workers on WhatsApp that I no longer owed anything. This is after hours of waiting on phone calls / WhatsApp and even being hung up on 3 TIMES without them calling me back. I still remember the feeling of utter disgust now. I have full screenshots and records of all of this communication as it's all on in my WhatsApp history. Fast forward a month, and what do I receive? A cancellation payment invoice for £20.54. I was annoyed that I'd been lied to by the support staff (and yes, don't try and spin it any other way, I was lied to by VM staff and have the proof to back it up), but my thinking was 'I will pay £20.54 to never have anything to do with Virgin Media ever again'. So I paid it on 3rd July, which was well within the payment window. I breathed a sigh of relief as I finally severed the connection between me and VM, who genuinely have one of the most inept infrastructures for a company that I've ever had the bad fortune to cross paths with. So, having been a loyal customer for years, paying them thousands of pounds, and even paying a bill to cancel the account that I shouldn't have had to pay - you know where that gets you? I do. Yesterday they put a missed payment on my credit file for this £20.54, that I have a payment receipt for and that I've have clarified by their support staff as being paid. I've spent 7 years building up that credit file so I can start to buy a house - that's all gone down the toilet now because VM apparently want to punish people just for wanting to leave. No apology, no compensation, just lies and passing-the-buck (and just plain hanging up on me) by support staff saying it'd be removed in 24 hours - it hasn't, it's still there, and I'm guessing it'll stay there until Virgin decide differently. Vile. So where does that leave us? Personally I'm sick of this. I'm sick of huge companies making money hand over fist through their customers, only to turn around one say and bite the hand that feeds them. I'm currently getting some advice from the Citizens Advice Bureau and a lawyer that I have a phone call scheduled in for Friday. Whats next The first thing that I've done is started to gather all of the blog posts from this forum from people who have had similar situations - credit file ruined by greedy, morally-void actions. I'll be in touch with as many as I can, however there are over 280 hits when I search for similar posts, so if you can post a link or your forum post, or if you can post the issues you had underneath this one then I'll start to gather all of your information. Nobody should have to suffer this for apparently no reason other than you had the audacity to want to leave Virgin. Let's put it all in one place so they can't ignore it, and we'll see what we can do from there. Together we are stronger against companies like VM, and lets be honest - they're only going to change their procedure to this situation is if they are confronted with something they can't ignore and / or costs them money. And before a support staff says something along the lines of: 'have you followed the instructions that we gave you...' 'this doesnt match what we have on our records...' any other lame, pass-the-buck excuse that requires more hours wasted talking to support I want you to know that I'm not wasting anymore time chasing this through support; I've been passed from pillar to post enough, and had enough time wasted - I'd prefer to chase some compensation for time / money lost. I'm a freelancer by trade, so time = money, and you've already cost me alot of money, not to mention stress, and not to mention ruining my credit score for absolutely no reason. You added the missed payment to my credit file, and you've since confirmed that it was paid - you fix it: You broke it - you buy it. This could all be resolved by simply investing some money in finding the issue that keeps this happening, that keeps ruining peoples lives, that makes people depressed and angry - but I suppose that's an unnecessary cost to VM, no? Pathetic. Anyway, here's a list of other people with similar issues, and this link has some great advice (see accepted answer) to get some compensation from VM - I think we all deserve it considering we've had our credit files ruined, our stress levels skyrocketed, our time wasted and our hand bitten by this company for absolutely no reason. Anyway, here's the list: https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Credit-score-ruined/m-p/4825762 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/credit-score/m-p/4971111 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/Credit-score-ruined/m-p/5230750 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/credit-score-ruined/m-p/5233524 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Virgin-Mobile/Ruin-credit-score/m-p/5345259 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/Credit-Score-Ruined-Mortgage-Declined/m-p/5339229 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/Credit-score-ruined-VM-fault/m-p/5158411 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/Missed-Payment-Credit-Report-Ruined/m-p/5305321 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Managing-Your-Account-Cable/Virgin-ruined-credit-score-for-bills-I-ve-paid/m-p/5255523 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Credit-Score-Ruined-Hard-Search/m-p/5051185 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/FALSE-INFORMATION-RUINED-MY-CREDIT-SCORE/m-p/4846407 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Credit-Score/m-p/4807080 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Credit-Score-False-Information/m-p/4988145 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/Amend-my-Credit-File/m-p/4682748 https://community.virginmedia.com/t5/Forum-Archive/DEFAULT-REMOVAL/m-p/5050589 This is really just the tip of the iceberg - there are hundreds of other hits, however if you can post your own nightmare experience with this company than please do below. Don't let them get away with it, hold them to account and show them that they need to change their processes. As they're too greedy to invest any money to find out the problem and fix it, they either need to be confronted with the problem, or it'll keep happening.