Dear Virgin Media, about those scam calls

Dear Virgin Media

About those scam calls we have been getting?

We have a home phone. A landline. We never use it. We have it because even if we don’t have it you still charge us for having a landline and our bill doesn’t change. This makes no sense in itself but is another rant for another day.

Recently, we started to get the odd spam call. Maybe once a day, someone claiming to be from Amazon, HMRC, or even Virgin Media, telling us we owed money, our internet was bad, etc. We know these are phishing calls and we don’t fall for it. We figured our phone number had been shared somewhere. Annoying but not really much to worry about. Our phone number is on the TPS list but we still got the calls.

Then, in the past few weeks, it got worse. Every day, between 10 and 25 calls. All from the same type of caller, and ALL claiming to be from Virgin Media. Telling us that Virgin Media rules the internet and controls it and that they need to access our computer to “fix it”. Because we know this is a scam, we don’t give them any information and of course we don’t allow them access to our computer. Sometimes I even play them along, much to the amusement of my children and husband, then they realise we are onto them and hang up.

We got fed up when one day we had over 35 calls. Same theme, different number every time.

I have had several Twitter chats with you guys, and you keep telling me to

1) register our number with the TPS – that’s done

2) call or message Action Fraud so they can investigate – because I have time to do that 35 times a day

3) make sure I don’t give the scammers any information

and rinse and repeat

Eventually we got fed up and rang you and asked for a new number, which you promptly gave us. Our old number no longer works and we have a new to us number. NO ONE HAS THIS NUMBER. We have not given it to anyone. It’s new to us.

Phew. Problem solved. Or so we thought.

Two days later, the calls begin again. The same theme, the same attempts to scam us.

I speak to Virgin on Twitter and they tell me the same thing as above.

In all of this the implication somehow is that this is our fault. With our old number potentially it could be, as perhaps at some point we gave it out and it’s somehow got on a list that is now used by scammers.

But a brand new to us number only 4 days old??

The problem lies with you, and you seem to think it’s ok that we are getting scam calls all day. You are refusing to admit that there is clearly a flaw in your system and you keep shifting the blame to your customers or fobbing us off.

At some point, or somewhere in your system, someone has access to Virgin telephone numbers and they are calling people to try and scam them.

You don’t seem to be doing anything about it other than shift blame and not seeming to care.

We pay our bills on time, we are not demanding cusotmers. We simply need a phone number that isn’t being accessed by scammers and harassing us.

You even told us to contact the police at one point. Because the boys in blue have time to deal with clearly what is a security breech with you.

So, I am annoyed, in fact I am very PISSED off. We are taking this further because you refuse to admit it’s your problem and not ours.

So, what say you Virgin Media? What are you going to do to fix this? Is it perhaps due to the massive data breech that happened last year, or maybe it’s something else.

I don’t really care, I would like some help and some answers…

Yours, annoyed, about to hurl the phone out the window, fed up of answering calls to scammers pretending to be from Virgin Media…

Tired Mum Blogger

*For information on phone scams and phishing calls please read here, don’t ever give details over the phone to someone if you aren’t sure who they are and always check why someone is calling you*