Virgin Media!

juk_2

We have been good customers of Telewest/Virgin Media for over ten years. We have never faulted a payment and never had any serious problems with our phone line, internet or T.V. packages.

On 26th January 2008 an Engineer from Virgin Media came out to repair a fault on our phone line (the line went dead for some reason on the 19th January) and since that exact date unknown mobile numbers started appearing on our telephone bill. Calls were being made to Yemen and Saudi Arabia which came to £147 on the phone bill. These calls were not made by us and only started on the date the engineer had came. Over the past our monthly bills for telephone calls have been around £20, with about 20-30 calls made – this bill had almost 250 made. We had also been receiving random phone calls from people we did not know saying our number had phoned them, sometimes at ridiculous hours like 2 a.m.

Another engineer came out from Virgin Media to check the physical line (green box outside house) and said there was NO problem on the line!

We asked for an investigation by Virgin Media and this was escalated to the fraud department. We also asked for a total call barring to go on the phone line to try and stop these hacked phone calls being made from our line. The current bill is totalling another £100 already. We were not told how to activate this call barring plus we had to wait a further 24 hours for it to be on our account as the previous advisor put a ban to premium rate numbers only on the account which needed 24 hours to remove. It was finally active on Thursday 28th February this is logged on the computer.

On the 2nd March we were very shocked and disturbed to receive another call from an unknown person who had received a call from OUR number which he obviously would not recognise. We did not phone this person. We rang Virgin Media immediately to see what had happened to the call barring; they said it was still active. We asked how someone could get around the call barring as only my mother knows the PIN number and hasn’t shared it anyone. The advisor this time was totally unhelpful and wasn’t the least bit interested.

So our account is still being charged for these calls we are not making.

We have gathered written evidence of our clocking-in records from the workplaces of all of us to prove we were out when some of these calls were being made.

We were put on soft disconnect about 2 weeks ago, no TV, no Internet and no usage of the calls - but they carried on (bill is now around £600).

Then we were told by the Fraud Department that this was NOT a case of illegal fraudulent use, which leaves us all destroyed.

We got back intouch with customer services and the woman my mother spoke to sounded very helpful and checked our records, we've NEVER even dialed a bloody international number in 10 years!!

Basically, 10+ years of fine service,
26th January Engineer comes to "fix" line,
huge amount of calls from that date,
2nd engineer came out to check line and said there was NO crossed wire or anything,
fraud squad says it's not hacked or illegal usage...

We had another engineer come out on the 4th April and he clearly said there was not a crossed wire at the green box outside or the white box outside our house. He also said calls cannot be made from our line, and even offered to put the line back to make outgoing calls which we denied until this investigation/mess is finally over.

On 7th April we received a phone call from Credit Solutions a debt collection agency asking the account owner to phone them back which we can’t anyway because we cannot make outgoing phone calls.

Vampgirl

Afraid I can't offer any real advice but that must be a terrible situation to be in. I work in telecoms (tho we don't have home customers, its all business stuff) and I know how long it can take sometimes to find a fault, it can be really frustrating. We've had pretty good service from VM over the years and only ever had to report one fault and I did find that some staff are more knowledgable than others.

All I can suggest is posting your problem in the phone problems section on this forum: http://www.cablehell.co.uk/forums/. There are several VM staff that help out and have been known to solve people's problems from posts on there so you might get some extra help?

Edited to add: Maybe OFCOM could help if you raise a complaint with them http://www.ofcom.org.uk/complain/landline/ But I think you need to have exhausted VM's own complaints procedure before they will take action.