Virgin Media Help Please

[Foosmummy]

Posting on behalf of a friend......

Sept this year, They took out a contract with VM. This was for BB, And the phone, It was £27.50 a month. There was no signed agreement, Just verbal over the phone.. So far they have been cut off four times due to having a limit on the phone.. They can't understand, As they were never told there would be a limit, And they hadn't asked for one either. They have been charged £10 once, Due to disagreeing with the limit, Which then went into a late payment charge. VM are now phoning them to say they owe them more money otherwise they will be cut off, Bearing in mind they had just paid £100 for the last bill...

Any help or advice on what to do next..

Many thanks in advance.

[RETURNED TO SENDER]

£100 for 1 month !!! how many calls are they making ?

[davethorp]

Virgin media are perfectly allowed to implement a call limit especially for new customers in order to both protect virgin media and prevent customers from running up huge phone bills.

If the bill is in the region of £100 they need to take a good hard look at the call package they are on, when they are making calls and who to as frankly a landline bill of that a month is shocking (we spend no more than £10 a month over our minimum rental on virgin media on calls)

If they are calling landlines, on the current package they are only free at weekends for up to an hour and then they will have to redial. Calls at all other times are chargable however they can get free evening and weekend calls to landlines by upgrading to package L or free calls to landlines anytime on XL.

Calling mobiles, adding the call mobile add on will reduce a little however my personal recommendation would be to pick up a cheap phone on vodafone pay as you go and activate vodafone stop the clock and free weekends. They will then get evening calls up to an hour for 30p with free calls to vodafone and landlines at weekends and an hour of calls to other networks at weekends (after which we are back to 30p for an hour)

Calling 0870 or similar numbers, check out SAYNOTO0870.COM - Non-Geographical Alternative Telephone Numbers and use the alternative numbers.

Calling premium rate.... Well just STOP IT!!!

[Conniff]

Virgin media are perfectly allowed to implement a call limit especially for new customers in order to both protect virgin media and prevent customers from running up huge phone bills.

So why not advise people of that when they subscribe.

[davethorp]

Originally Posted by Conniff

So why not advise people of that when they subscribe.

Company Terms and Conditions (On Cable)

Section F6b

[Conniff]

So customer error. I do notice on here that a lot complain about some service or other and have not read the T&C's, so good advice would be if you have what you think is a complaint then read the T&C's before you follow that complaint through.

[10110001]

Originally Posted by Foosmummy

Posting on behalf of a friend......
There was no signed agreement, Just verbal over the phone.

Originally Posted by davethorp

Company Terms and Conditions (On Cable)
Section F6b

Regulation 5(5) of Shedule 2 of The Unfair Terms in Consumer Contracts Regulations 1999 says:

(i) irrevocably binding the consumer to terms with which he had no real opportunity of becoming acquainted before the conclusion of the contract

[davethorp]

Personally cannot see what is unfair about imposing a call limit given it is there to protect both the customer and the company (if more companies did this we wouldn't keep having the horror stories of people running up huge telecoms bills and not being able to pay them).

Fair enough they maybe should have been told over the phone or given a copy of the terms to peruse first (which probably did happen in order to comply with distance selling regs). When I signed up to VM it was done online and over the phone and I received a welcome pack a couple of days later with both a copy of the relevant legal stuff and a contract to sign and return. I also has a time to cancel my order if I wasn't happy with everything

As I stated in my first post on this thread, if someone is spending £100 on calls in a month they really need to have a look what plan they are on and amend accordingly (or make better use of inclusive landline/mobile minutes if they call mobiles a lot or use less telephone sex lines if they call premium a lot)