Overcharging with 05pence

alanjwilliams

I have just noticed the same thing on my bill. I have been dialing an 0844 200 number to call Hong Kong, and theyve been charging me 7p per min or so..

I phoned up customer services and was told that was right. I had to sit in front of my laptop and navigate through the virgin media web pages with the lady from customer services doing the exact same thing at her end to show her what call band the number is (0844 200 - PG22) and what that translates to (7p set up, 1p per min..)

She has now registered this as a fault i should hear back from someone in 5 days... really unimpressed as i had show them their own charges, which stinks of incompetence. I had to phone VM a couple of months back after I noticed they had charged me for a Pay Per View movie when we dont even have a TV service. I just wonder how much they get away with from people who dont check their bills!

maciek

alanjwilliams wrote: »

I have just noticed the same thing on my bill. I have been dialing an 0844 200 number to call Hong Kong, and theyve been charging me 7p per min or so..

I phoned up customer services and was told that was right. I had to sit in front of my laptop and navigate through the virgin media web pages with the lady from customer services doing the exact same thing at her end to show her what call band the number is (0844 200 - PG22) and what that translates to (7p set up, 1p per min..)

She has now registered this as a fault i should hear back from someone in 5 days... really unimpressed as i had show them their own charges, which stinks of incompetence. I had to phone VM a couple of months back after I noticed they had charged me for a Pay Per View movie when we dont even have a TV service. I just wonder how much they get away with from people who dont check their bills!

:T

you're the man! I'm in exactly the same situation. Got bill today from VM, hugely overprices calls to 08442009898.... few times at least.
First 45mins with customer adviser and then his manager... they kept telling me that its access number (agreed) and its variable rate(???) and they don't know how much each call should be charged etc. finally that I should contact PhoneCheap with complaint as its not Virgin Media problem....

basically !!!!!! off, thats what they were trying to do...

So I hanged up and did some quick googling and this time again this forum comes handy! Found this thread, then looked up exact documents on Virgin website and exactly the same drill as above. I had to go with some dumb girl through each page of virgin website to guide her to the price plan as she insisted that 0844 is a special service and definatelly cannot be ONLY 1p per minute... so another 15 minutes with her trying to find pdf 1 following my guidance, then 10 minutes to locate pdf 2 which explains what PG22 stands for... finaly another 10 minutes on hold because it was simply too difficult for her to understand in less then 10 seconds... hugely complicated documents... anyway to cut the long story short,

I was advised someone will call me back within 48h with calculation how much exactly I should have been charged and how much refund will I receive....

Now two things come to my mind, one is why the f**k they pretend not to know what is going on, surely I'm not the only one using 0844 number in this country and they must have had more complaints in the last few days.

Other thing is that I'm already afraid that I will need to follow exactly the same steps next month when bill comes... so hopefully they'll fix their system by then... I've saved copy of pdf's just in case ;-)

:beer:

BexTech

Some Telco's such as TalkTalk had in their terms that if the 0844 or 0870 or 0871 number was an access number then they would charge more for that call - TalkTalk even saying they might charge you more for line rental or kick you off their service completely.

Not saying Virgin are doing this or going to do this, but they might if more and more people bypass their extortionate rates.

It does appear the old billing error fault.

isayoldchap

You would think that they should act very quickly when a customer is being overcharged for these gateway calls.As soon as the call comes through a supervisor should alert the IT dept and within a short time should be rectified.
Instead you maybe told 3-5 days.
Will they refund you the whole telephone call charges?
They should as the hidden (less than 50p calls)could have been overcharged too.