Warning: new Virgin Trains website deliberately overcharges

Thinking I was doing Virgin a favour by reporting a pricing error on their new (and rather user unfriendly imho) booking website, I was surprised to be told (after several email exchanges) that the overcharge is deliberate.

I wanted a Saver Return from Nuneaton to London Euston travelling out on Friday 7 Sep at 10:35 and returning on Sunday 9 Sep at 18:56. The Saver Return is priced at £30.50 on the direct route and £35.00 if routed via Coventry. I was successfully able to book the £30.50 fare on the old version of Virgin's website which is still available at virgintrainsfares.co.uk.

On the new website, Saver Returns are sold as as two one-way "Half Savers" which is a pseudo-ticket type only available on this website. For the outbound journey, these are correctly priced at £15.25 and £17.50 according to the route. However, the return journey is priced only at £17.50 for standard class (although they do have first class correctly priced at £25.25 (=£15.25 + £10 upgrade). I thought this was clearly a programming bug, but no, Virgin insist this is correct, and the official advice from them is not to book online but to book through their Telesales operation.

Isn't this sharp practice (or even fraud)? - to deliberately quote a higher price rather than the correct one?

Martin