For millions of Virgin Media customers, the simple act of cancelling a broadband or TV contract became a Kafkaesque ordeal of deliberately dropped calls, endless holds and aggressive pressure to stay – a pattern the regulator has now punished with a record £28m fine.
The communications watchdog Ofcom said on Tuesday that between January 2022 and September 2024, call centre agents at Virgin Media “likely mishandled” millions of calls, deliberately preventing or delaying customers from switching to a better deal. Tactics included “deliberately hanging up calls” and putting customers on hold “for no reason”, as well as excessive transfers and repeated attempts to pressure them into staying.
“Ofcom fines Virgin Media £28m for deliberately hanging up on millions of customers trying to cancel contracts.”
Ofcom’s investigation found that Virgin Media’s commission scheme “effectively encouraged” agents to behave in this way by financially rewarding them for retaining customers at any cost. The penalty was reduced by 30% because Virgin Media admitted its failings and agreed to settle, the regulator added.
Natalie Black, Ofcom’s group director for infrastructure and connectivity, described the company’s actions as “pretty shocking” and said the firm had failed to cooperate fully. “Right at the beginning of this problem, a number of years ago in 2022, we tried to resolve this informally. There wasn’t the will to do that,” she told the BBC’s Today programme. “The facts are clear. Virgin Media made it harder for customers to cancel their contracts and then did not fully cooperate with our investigation.”
Anthony, a 58-year-old from Brighton who had been a Virgin customer for a decade, said his experience trying to cancel his TV package last August felt like a battle. He said prices “were going up astronomically for the last three or four years”. When he phoned, the call was deliberately mishandled – one of millions of interactions that Ofcom said likely acted as a “disincentive” for customers who wished to leave.
Virgin Media apologised to “the small proportion who experienced an issue when contacting us to agree a new deal or cancel their service in the past”. It added that it had “resolved all formal customer complaints from this period providing redress where appropriate”. But Ofcom has ordered the company to check within six months that every affected customer who complained has received the compensation or other remedies they were entitled to.
The fine – one of the largest ever imposed by Ofcom for consumer protection failings – sends a clear signal to telecoms providers that deliberately obstructing cancellations will not be tolerated. For the millions of Virgin customers caught in the company’s retention machinery, it may be too late to recover the time and frustration they lost.