Virgin Media has been fined $28 million by U.K. regulators after Ofcom found the company had blocked customers from cancelling contracts. The penalty lands on a company accused of making people wait, transfer and try again when they simply wanted out.
Ofcom said it received 1,881 complaints before opening its investigation, and then found that Virgin Media mishandled millions of calls over a three-year period. The regulator said agents used unnecessary transfers to stymie cancellation requests, and that the company’s commission scheme financially rewarded discouraging exits. In practice, some customers were forced to cancel through their banks and card providers.
The size of the fine matters, but the conduct behind it matters more. Ofcom said Virgin Media had built a two-tier agent system that made it impossible to cancel without speaking to at least two people, while some customers who went around the phone lines also saw their credit scores dinged. That combination turned a customer service problem into a barrier designed to keep people trapped.
Virgin Media accepted the verdict and admitted its failures, which reduced the fine from the level regulators could have imposed. That acceptance sits uneasily beside Ofcom’s finding that the company deliberately encouraged the obstruction through its pay structure. The company did not just tolerate bad service; the regulator said it paid for it.
The case lands at a moment when Virgin Media has long been seen as the weakest of the big broadband names on customer service, with Which Magazine giving it a score of 38 out of 100 and weak marks for technical support and getting in touch. It also comes as cancellation rules have shifted in the U.K., making it automatic when customers move to a new provider, which should have made this kind of obstruction harder, not easier.
What Ofcom has not said is how many individual customers were caught in the system. But the scale it did set out — millions of calls, 1,881 complaints and a three-year pattern — leaves little room for the idea that this was a handful of bad calls. It reads instead like a business process that kept failing in the same direction until regulators stepped in.
