Further to my release of 22 September, Virgin Media overcharging callers trying to avoid Tesco Business Rate numbers, I understand the problem is still continuing. Virgin Media has not refunded the historic overcharges and some callers to Tesco geographic numbers are being charged for operator connected calls to MOBILE, as well as 0845, numbers.
I have been in direct contact to confirm the detail of cases that continue to be reported on the SayNoTo0870 and MoneySavingExpert forums (Links available here).
Virgin Media and Tesco need to get the situation sorted and issue public apologies for what is clearly a mistake.
Ofcom should get involved in cases like this, which are obviously having a serious impact on many people, without waiting for every victim to come forward and register a formal complaint with it.
When Ofcom is seen to be ineffective and reluctant to act – why would people bother to raise individual complaints?
We have the right to expect Ofcom to act with intelligence, not shuffle papers, collect statistics and deliberately discourage receipt of the information which would cause it to act.
There is an echo of the way in which Ofcom deals with my other focus of attention – Silent Calls – see my Silent Calls Victim blog.
I totally agree with the comments made here.
ReplyDeleteOfcom should not be waiting until a certain number of complainants have made representations. It knows that there is an issue and it should act as a matter of principle.
There should be no threshold of number of consumers contacting the regulator before it acts. These people are those who notice that they have been overcharged and then decide to report the fact to the regulator.
By functioning in the way it does, Ofcom is acting to support any wrongs that are done by providers, but which aren't noticed by a large enough group of consumers.
Furthermore, those who do report such matters will be less enthused to do so in the future, should they be on the receiving end of another provider that is behaving outside of the rules.