Virgin Mobile & their Credit Check Fiasco

anandp

With my Orange mobile coming to the end of its contract, I decided to look at Virgin Mobile and their 30-day rolling pay monthly SIMS seemed a good idea.

So I ordered this online, completed an online credit check and paid 99p for my SIM's delivery. When it came through I called to provide my Orange PAC code and that's when I find out that the number they've sent is on PAYG, not pay monthly.

In fact their Philippines based call centre are completely helpful and VERY process driven - I'd question if they're human at all!

I was told I didn't have an online Virgin account even though I said to the person while on the phone that I'd managed to log in with the details created when ordering the SIM. He set me up another one over the phone, and proceeded to perform a credit check, which he said I failed because my date of birth was incorrect. assured him that only my mother has the authority to tell me that, but he refused to do anything else but provide me with a postal address to write to to get my credit file looked at.

I emailed theteam@virginmedia.co.uk and theteam@virginmedia.com but they were non responsive too though one of those emails led to a voicemail in which they said they'd try me again but never did.

I then called and go through to someone in Sheffield who was much more helpful. Couldn't do anything from a systems point of view but gave me the Credit Team's phone number. They were very helpful and sorted things within 24 hours. The guy pretty much said that its been a constant problem with the overseas call centre. The failed credit check should never have been done because he could see I passed the first online one!

He couldn't add my contract since that was a Sales job but the Philippines people keep insisting their system doesn't allow the change from PAYG to pay monthly without a credit check (even though they can already see I've passed one less than 6 days ago)!

Anyone else had this problem?