Clingy Virgin Media won't let us leave, customers complain Virgin Media, which provides broadband, phone and TV services in the UK, is in hot water with regulators over allegations that the company is making it difficult for customers to cancel their contracts. Ofcom announced that it had opened an investigation into the broadband provider today after receiving a number of similar …
BT have a habit of putting people on contracts that they weren't aware of.
Want to leave? Well you can't, because you're in a two-year contract. Why? Oh, because when you phoned to complain that your broadband wasn't fast enough last month, we put you on our 'super-flexible-speed-guarantee' tariff for two years. It offers us flexibility to use your money to dream up new ways of sucking people in, and it give you our broadband speed guarantee. What's that? Oh, that means that if your speed drops to less than 1 Mbps for more than 10 consecutive night-time hours in any given year, we send you a KitKat, and sign you up to our next highest tariff for two more years.
"BT have a habit of putting people on contracts that they weren't aware of."
And if the customer hasn't signed that contract then it isn't worth the paper it wasn't written on. More so if BT didn't send the customer a copy of the updated contract.
Now, the contract you have signed may include a clause covering renewal and moving a customer to a new contract, but legally they have to notify the customer of this before it happens and include a copy (or link to) the new terms and conditions, and the customer has a right to cancel without penalty if this happens (think it's a two week window - may be a month - would need to check). That then transfers the 'signature' to the new contract, but the consumer rights do still apply.
O2 Virgin are just as bad. I had a PAC from them and a full transfer. Im still getting billed for a non existant service on a non exiatant account. O2 were flummoxed the first month as "it shouldnt have happened as the computer says you have no products with us". No shit. So stop fucking charging me.
They'll stop very quickly if you file with moneyclaimonline - and if they keep charging after a judge rules they must stop it becomes contempt of court (which gets very expensive, very quickly and puts individuals within the company at risk of spending time in courthouse holding cells)
Worst
Broadband provider
Ever
IMNSHO -- they've raised our rate from £38/mo to £68/month in the last 18 months. As I'm currently underemployed I have to have internet access. About to call and threaten to leave due to circumstances and see where, if anywhere, that gets me for a reduction! Can't take another month if I can 1/2 my bill by moving back to Fibre to the green box instead...
How on earth does that even happen though? Your price would normally only go up by that much if you were at the end of contract, and surely you'd know that you were? I just don't understand how this happens to people. I contact them well in advance of my contract ending and if anything I end up with a reduction, never an increase.
Also, if you are I assume unemployed rather than underemployed (same thing? Typo?) Then don't forget the social tariffs that are available to order from providers.
Because when Virgin say that they're increasing the price by RPI + 3%, they refer to the price before the "fixed" discount that they've offered you. Eg the package I'm on "retails" for £70 something, but 12 months ago I got them to do it for £36 (like everyone else does). They're not actually doing it for £36 though, they're applying a £34 discount on my bill. So the "retail" price went up by (for example) £10, my bill goes up by £10 too as the discount is fixed and not subject to inflationary adjustments.
Combine that with the fact that they only let you leave / renegotiate _before_ that increase happens (and supposedly let you know by some form of writing that never actually appears) and the people on the end of the phone are less than inclined to help
Yep. If you phone up when they do that I've found they'll then offer you a new deal that's approximately the same as your previous one. Of course then you're locked in for another 18 months, and in 12 months it'll all be repeating, hence why you can't ever escape. This time I got totally fed up and told them that as they'd increased my bill by so much I was leaving immediately. I had a long, um, debate with a drone over web chat which ended promptly when the customer service team shut down for the night. The following day I got an automated email asking if my issue was resolved, I naturally said it wasn't, got connected to a different drone who just put it through immediately with no questions asked. I think if you persist they eventually give up.
Ask for their social tariff.
Call them and tell the first lot that you speak to that you want to cancel. Be persistent. Take no bullshit.
They will eventually put you through to somebody who actually has the power to negotiate.
Tell them you want to cancel. They will make you an offer. If you find it acceptable then take it.
If they don't come up with an offer that's acceptable tell them you want to cancel - this is with a month's notice.
Sometime in that month you'll get a call from them with a better offer. Again if it's acceptable take it. If not say so.
You can cancel your cancellation any time within the notice month if you feel it necessary.
What you MUST do is convince them that you're not bullshitting and will cancel if necessary.
Be prepared to go through the same rigmarole in 18 months time.
Virgin sent me a random email the other day saying my contract expired in 2015 and would I like to renew for 25% off. I'd not long renewed my contract and it had already been discounted. I'm now paying 25% less and locked in to roughly the same period of my contract than I was. Not entirely sure what's happening there. Maybe it was related to this and they are trying to head off any reputation damage?
Reputation wise, all of the big names have bad reputations. Virgin media service is different all over the country thanks to different integrated legacy networks, as well as just how much sunlight the cabinet gets at the end of your street. Customer service wise I tend to find if you use their WhatsApp it is reasonably pleasant. I've not rung them up for a while.
Sometimes when people ring to cancel they're just not firm enough about it and they let themselves get sucked in to the retentions dance. However sometimes that retentions dance can actually be in your favour and you choose not to leave anyway. If you deal with them politely and firmly on the phone I can't see how they can really make it difficult past a few offers being chucked your way that you can dismiss.
Make a reasonable number of attempts to cancel and record any calls. Send an email to the appropriate departments and if no response in two weeks just cancel the direct debit. It is amazing how fast they get in touch if they cannot get into your bank account at which point you bring up all the attempts you have made to follow their processes and please supply the MAC/PAC to move to a different provider
and no, you will not re-enable the DD
I don't know how it works elsewhere, but in the US, you can file a dispute to any bad marks on your credit report. Companies that put the bad mark on there have 30 days to respond confirming it, or it automatically goes away. They almost never answer these disputes, so the bad mark goes away.
There is/was a business of "Credit Cleaning" where all they did was to file disputes to everything on you credit report, hoping that there would be little response to them. It did wok to some extent. You pay a fee to some outfit, and boom, your credit score is better. I'm not sure I see this as a legitimate business, however.
Sounds like Virgin and O2 both really know how to piss off their customers (must be why Virgin mobile and O2 merged).
I'm in the process of trying to cancel my O2 contract, but as they don't have an email address or contact form on their web site, the only option is to phone customer service using '202'. (I did ask in store but although you can sign up in store you have to phone them to cancel your contract).
This means that since their mast is down (again, 4 days and counting this time) the only way I can call them is to use a standard rate landline number which means I end up paying to cancel a service that I've paid for which doesn't put me in a good mood.
Eventually after going through the call handling system I get placed in a queue and told that the expected waiting time was 45 minutes.
O-2? O-no more like...
You don't have to call them
Text PAC to 65075 then give your PAC to a new provider.
That'll give you your code to transfer.
Text STAC to 75075 if you just want to leave completely.
This was dealt with for mobile companies. They have to comply. If they don't, complain to Ofcom.
Of course what doing this also normally does is get someone to call you, offering retention. By which time you've either already got your code or set cancellation in motion.
I had to call them twice but I now have a confirmation email that my service will be terminated this weekend. However, I had to take my phone to work and call them from there as my local mast is STILL down (next update is due 27/7 by which time it will be three weeks without any service), and calling then from a landline was an expensive exercise in futility.
If anyone reading this is thinking of using O2 - I couldn't recommend them any less.
That's close to what I did....
There was a nearby lightning strike a few months ago. The resultant spike down their unprotected network smoked their "Hub" and destroyed most of the things connected to its Ethernet ports. Two days later, they sent 'round an oik with a replacement "Hub" - and then proceeded to try to charge me for an "engineering visit". I pointed out that their bloke had just dumped the Hub in my doorway and beaten a hasty retreat. I connected the Hub, and after several hours managed to get a connection at less than 10% of the speed I was paying for....
Phone calls to their "help desk" were pointless. Their people mostly couldn't speak English, and were connected over the worst VOIP connections I've ever heard..... I decided that this had to end, so I wrote a firmly worded letter to their CEO, and made sure to send it by Recorded Delivery. I also cancelled my Direct Debit.
The next day I was connected to "Zen" via City Fibre. I now have a connection more than eight times faster than I was paying for at VM at slightly less than half the monthly price. Zen also provided a nice "Fritz!Box". I now have a proper internet connection, and for the last four months it has been flawless. In the meantime, all the neighbours have migrated from VM to City Fibre.....
...that companies were obligated to make sure that consumers can cancel contracts/recurring arrangements/subscriptions using the same means by which they signed up.
i.e. if you let people sign up to a service online, you have to provide functionality to let them cancel online
It's not a big ask.
I moved from a cabled area to a non-cabled area but Virgin Media's system didn't comprehend that such areas existed. Probably because they didn't provide a conventional service to this area either. Major battle ensued to switch to a different provider.
Same experience here. Moved home recently, already checked to see if I could port my service and couldn't. Tried to cancel and All I got was chatbot that couldn't help. Called up and was told to use chatbot. A long time later (hours) I got through to somebody in, well let's not call it "cancellations", it was the "customer retention" side. Asked my reason for wanting to cancel and would I consider a different tariff (new 24 month contract ahoy). Didn't read a damn thing from the chatbot or anything else I'd divulged. Had to give them my new address so they could confirm that they couldn't help me and then agreed to cancel the service.
I was out of contract and should have been able to phone up and say "cancel and confirm my last payment date".
Better than Plusnet, though, who won't even let you cancel if you're dead!
I have no direct experience of Virgin, except getting junk-mail (dead tree versions) when the whole road isn't covered by them.
However, I found Plusnet quite good when cancelling broadband for a recently deceased parent-in-law, they didn't even hold us to the rest of the month. I guess it helped having already having my name on the account as being authorised to talk about the account (having been doing the in-house tech support for some years).
"I have no direct experience of Virgin, except getting junk-mail (dead tree versions) when the whole road isn't covered by them."
Many years ago, chatting with someone quite senior when it was still Telewest branded as Blueyonder, pre the merger with NTL and their subsequent branding of NTL:Telewest as VirdinMedia and eventual sale to Liberty, I asked about the "mail bombing" and he said it was far, far cheaper to mailbomb an area, town, county etc than to target specific addresses, so getting "unwanted" dead tree spam is just something we all have to live with since the businesses really don't care about much other than costs and profits. I get regular spam from MBNA, have done for years, despite never having any business relationship with them or any of their associated companies. I could almost set my calendar by their regular three monthly spam delivery :-)
I switched from Virgin Media to BT as I was out of contract and the BT deal was cheaper than any of the deals Virgin Media offered me. Choice from VM was limited as I was not a new customer. When I pointed out that the deal they were pushing was more expensive than the one I had been on and the rival package, they said it was the best they could do. Apart from the hassle of talking to the sales bods switching was relativity straight forward. They did ring me about a month after I had left them to offer me a new deal. Talk about desperate measures!
Another thing I hated about Virgin Media was their Customer portal. It was clunky and hard to navigate once you had logged in. The UI seemed to gave been designed in the last century. And don't even think about IPv6 as they have never heard of it.
"They did ring me about a month after I had left them to offer me a new deal. Talk about desperate measures!"
Just about all telco-origin companies pay bounties to sales staff for capturing business from a rival but offer virtually nothing for retaining an existing customer
The fun part is when they start offering to pay the contract-break fees as well
"I explain that I don't have a complaint but can't get through to where I need to go via the chatbot, keep getting cut off etc and can they assist? Seems to work okay."
Not being able to get through to the right department sounds like a perfectly valid complaint to me :-)
I left VM recently as the customer service was diabolical and the service was more unreliable than anything I had had previously. it took a bit of time but I was firm as I had signed up to CityFibre gigabit service. I received an email thanking me for returning the router, which is still sat on my desk! Which sort of sums up the whole experience.
You will still get them calling umpteen times to arrange collection of their kit. Despite what was agreed when the contract was terminated. Not that it matters as they'd be unlikely to keep to the appointment to collect. Eventually "Look, the kit no longer exists. I'm no longer living there" will sink in and they will stop calling.
Our stupid length contract with virgin was ending earlier this year. We had already lost a few channels we enjoyed and were ready to reduce the number of premium channels, switch our mobiles to another provider, drop the landline and greatly reduce our monthly bill; but no, the idiots on the CS line only cared about retention.
I have now switched to lebara at £4.50 a month with more than enough data to keep me happy, my partner was forced to switch from virgin to o2 and she is not happy and we cannot get rid of the premium channels (sky sports and movies, bt sport etc) as "we have no better bundle for you, sir).
I don't want a better bundle, I just want standard channels, no tie-in and no frigging fluffy bits on the side as neither of us use antisocial media.
When one dials 150 to get through to so-called customer support, be it for contractual or error reasons, we end up with outsourced call centres where the reps seem to only read from a script and have no mind or understanding themselves, alongside the fact that very few - if any - of them have any knowledge of English other than to try upselling.
This has become much worse since liberty media took over.
After having been a customer of the same company since the 90's, c&w, telewest, blueyonder, virgin, etc we find ourselves trapped in a kafkaesque situation where we cannot have sat dishes due to planning rules and therefore rely on the incumbent service.
I fucking hate them all.
"we cannot have sat dishes due to planning rules"
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/5a7c8d3340f0b62aff6c277b/householdersguideantennas.pdf
You only need planning permission for antennas under a limited set of circumstances (in general, a dish greater than 100cm or more than two dishes on the building)
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After requesting cancellation, vexatious Virgin Media is still texting me offers, despite my telling them repeatedly not to by text and phone. Their latest was "Broadband for £16 a month, or £100" credit. The first option new customers can get anyway (craftily, they've rigged their website so that offers to new customers are no longer visible to existing customers, even if you delete cache and cookies of your browsers, thereby making it harder for existing customers to haggle a better deal for themselves, using the threat of abandonment as leverage), and on a six month contract not 18 - this is how their "Loyalty Team" reward a pre-Blueyonder buyout era customer. It's all rather hurtful. Can't wait for disconnection on the 22nd, as this may indicate cancellation has been actioned. I pay by bill, not DD, so if there's any funny business (they say my bill next month will be £7, because a 30 day notice period is required for cancellation) I will have to consider whether to cease paying their bills to leave, because getting myself disconnected that way will affect my credit rating... which presumably might make signing up to some other provider more difficult than it would have been, if Virgin Media weren't so clingy.
Quite honestly, I haven't been inconvenienced using the Three network via Smarty via TP-Link MR200 SIM router, which was a nice surprise: no dropouts, speeds adequate for my needs, no traffic shaping, no blocks, no contract, cheap, all my devices including SIP phones are continuously and reliably connected. Cancelling Smarty is as easy as disabling auto-renew on their website, cancelling that pre-approved payment in Paypal, and throwing away the SIM so they can't call me... which is pretty easy if you ask me.
"Virgin Media is still texting me offers, despite my telling them repeatedly not to by text and phone"
https://www.moneysavingexpert.com/mobiles/stop-spam-texts/
I assume you're already registered with TPS? If so that's another set of breaches
Repeatedly making contact after being told to stop falls under the Protection from Harrassment Act and a criminal complaint wouldn't go amiss
My experiences with Virgin Media go back many years, so long ago they were actually considered a decent company. Since then however the American model has been adopted, and it has gone totally Trump. They will grab you between the legs and not let go until wrestled away by evil commie laws that deny lovely sweet true blue capitalist companies the right to have the shirt off your back along with any skin that might accidentally be attached.
My example was the year in year out free upgrades, that then required paying for the year after. And no. Returning back to the original speed was never allowed. I spent a long period unemployed and struggling with them over divisive contracts and in all my dealings they not once mentioned my unemployed and on benefit status qualified me for a hugely discounted package. Neither was it mentioned in any of their literature or on their website.
They're just evil and long may their routers rot in my local landfill.
Really? I told them I was moving to a remote research station in Norway and thus wanted to cancel my TV/broadband/phone (which I never got due to capacity constraint at the roadside) bundle. They wanted an address for the final bill, so I gave them my parent's address which is 400 yards down a private, unadopted road. They STILL offered to simply transfer my contract to Norwaegian research station, and when I gave them an address on Svalbard, they reluctantly admitted that they didn't actually have any service at that location. But would I like to transfer the services to my parent's house... which in those days only had plain old copper telephone, and even now only has fibre to the first 10 yards of the road at the owner's expense. It almost had to resort to faking a death certificate to get out of it. Even then I reckon they'd have put a TiVo box in my coffin.
What annoys me about VM is this.....If you want a new package/service/whatever you go to the website, click a few buttons, and hey presto, it's done. If you want to remove a service, you have to phone, get past the robot system, speak to a rep, who transfers you to the 'correct' rep, who then claims to be the wrong person to speak to before transferring you on to someone else. Eventually you get to the person who can do the necessary,but it's a right PITA! And that process assumes the initial phone call is actually answered, rather than being transferred to the 'we're busy helping other customers, call back later' machine.
I've been with vermin for years, since they were Nynex. I rarely have connection problems and when the service is working it works pretty well.
But when I do have a problem, getting any sense whatsoever out if them is a herculean task. Several years ago, I had a faulty cable modem. I called, went through the usual rigrmarole and was assured there was a fault in my area that would be rectified soon.
That may have been true, but I was pretty sure I had a faulty modem anyway. The problem certainly wasn't resolved "soon". In fact, I called numerous times over several weeks, each time being passed to an offshore call centre who told me the same story, and who eventually hung up when I insisted there was a problem.
Eventually, one of my increasingly irritated calls was taken by a very helpful Welsh lady who actually listened to what I was telling her. "Sounds like a faulty modem," was her immediate response. Hallelujah!
Since then, they haven't improved at all. Just a few weeks ago I helped someone cancel their service. It took numerous calls, including being on hold for ages and a refusal to let me speak to the operatives supervisor. The user is now a happy sky full fibre customer, paying much less for a faster service.
The trick is not selecting any options whatsoever... this eventually gets you into a ver ver ver long call queue noisy with scratchy horrible music, after which your call eventually gets answered by a human being, who puts you into a ver ver ver long noisy scracthy queue of dubious musicality to someone else.
I had to hunt for ages to even find any information about leaving on their website. I'm looking to leave them now as I've found a supplier that will offer more than twice the broadband speed for a lot less. Virgin prices are ridiculous and the inflation+3% at a time when inflation is so high is unbelievable. My broadband bill is my second largest single monthly bill.
OFCOM? Another useless government department wasting more taxpayers money and only protecting big corporations.
Everyone knows these contracts are a scam to sign people up on low deals and then hike up the prices. Mobile phone companies have been allowed to get away with it, by OFCOM, so other companies will jump on the gravy train.
“Ofcom rules state that customers can only leave mobile contracts early, penalty-free, if the price hike is of “material detriment” “
I left nearly 2 years ago after a epic fight and I still have all my virgin media kit in a cardboard box - locked TIVO, cable modem and a few RF connectors. I have tried to contact them to get them to pick it up but it always ends up with me being asked to give a 1..10 score on how good the pick up process was and the process ends there.
I might need to take it to the local tip to get it disposed of cleanly.
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To avoid that sort of malarkey is why I pay by bill, and have resisted ever paying by Direct Debit for years. I'm supposed to be disconnected in a couple of days... I'm considering not paying the final two bills (30 day notice required). Non-payment should result in disconnection, and the end of whatever contract Vermin imagine exists between me and them.
It's infuriating and outrageous that one has to risk a clean credit record to escape! Potentially impeding signup to another provider. Anything less than a CCJ should be ok? I have Smarty boradband via SIM router, it's faster than I expected - no credit checks anwyay, and a lot more reliable than Vermin Virgin FscksU Media. Yesterday, it took 5m 50s to upload a 440mb file to Youtube using Smarty = 1.26 megabytes per second. That'll do.
long time Vermin Moaner customer, when it works its great, you need to speak to customer services, heaven help you, long queue times and staff who barely know which what they are doing and to top it all off that's the UK call centre staff, if you get the Indian call centre, well I'm not going there to get called racist !
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