09083149092

This appeared on my Virgin Media telephone bill. - Thursday 18th Sept at 14.08pm ... nobody was in the house?

total cost: £26.90

I have no idea what the company is or why it has come about?

I had the same thing on Tues 23rd Sept. £26.90 and we were not at home. Virgin are refusing to help. How can we stop this?

Same here on Virgin Media as well! No one was at home yet we have been charged £25.62 for a 20 min call. Virgin are charging £100 for a check on our phone lines!

The same has happened to me.  22nd of September at 13.16.  A 20 minute call costing £26.90 + vat, which I did not make.

Have had the charge refunded by Virgin Media, but what is going on?

I have just got my bill and it shows a 21:00 minute call to this number on Mon 22 Sep at 13:16 costing £26.90.  Same as comment by Robert.

Am about to get onto Virgin Media

I have just got my bill and it shows a 21 minute call to this number on Wed 24 Sep at 14.44 costing £26.90  Nobody was in the house all at work. I have just phoned Virgin Media who have put a in a complaint and said I should get a refund. They have also given me a website to check these scam numbers it is www.phonepayplus.org.uk. Seemingly this number is an Adult call number.

had exactly the same thing. Same number, same length of call, same cost and noone was home. Virginmedia does not want to help, unhelpful, unfriendly and uncooperative Steve from faults "check"s the line, says can't find anything wrong. It seems clearly something going on with this number and virginmedia chooses to ignore this at the expense of victimising its own customers. Who's going to OFCOM first?

exactly the same for me, am waiting for virginmedia to look into it, if not satisfied with their reply definately going to call Ofcom

I left a comment on Saturday 18th Oct I have just received a call from Virgin Media. At first they were trying to say that someone at my address had made this call I assured them we hadn't I refused to pay the amount of £26.90 They said they could send an engineer to check the line but that would cost £100 I refused. After discussions with them they have agreed to refund my account.Please anyone else argue your case as we can't let this happen again.

Also known as Bovar     I posted a comment on Friday.

I have opened a thread on the newsgroup virginmedia.support.telephony.  A non customer services person looks after this input.  He does not seem to be getting any information through from customer services about this number.  I think he is concerned after being directed to this site.  If you arrive here concerned about being charged for a call you haven't made, do your best to access the site and assist him if you can.  The newsgroups feed can be set up through outlook express, using the server news.virginmedia.com.  Virginmedia have a help section on their website to set it up.

Exactly the same as one of the previous posters. We appear to have a
charged £26.90 for 21 mins to a premium call number 09083149092.
Virgin Media service desk offerred to give us a £10 credit back
as a courtesy but I didn't accept as in principal I think this
is wrong. I am confident no one called this number, so I do not know why
we should accept any charge.

Same as above

Virgin Media customer

Premium rate call

20 mins

0906 664 6558

No one in the house at the time (wife and I both at work)

Just noticed the last poster called Winchmore Hill. I also live in Winchmore Hill. I find that an extraordinary coincidence!!
Spoke to Virgin Media again. Essentially they not prepared to give way on this, as far as they are concerned their computers have the call listed against
our account. If I want to make an official complaint to them they will send an engineer to check the line, but if he concludes that the line is ok, and the that call was made from my phone then I get charged £100 for the engineer charge out. If I felt that the engineer could get to the bottom of what has happened here I would take the risk, but the VM service desk could not give me enough technical detail to convince me that he really could do that. Only course
left is to complain to OFCOM.

I'm from Enfield....just up the road.

Don't fall for the test your line @ £100 get out.  Why can't the 'fault' be in their exchange?

They are picking us off 1 by 1....some get off, others suffer.
No one is looking at the whole issue....why all this trouble over one number...09083149092...its only one of a load of 'adult service' numbers.  Someone at VM needs to collect all the data on these complaints together and see if there's a pattern.....exchange, time of day etc. VM need to involve their technical staff.
It couldn't be VM's fault, could it. No one could possibly be abusing their own network.

Just remarkable that 3 of us are having problems with this number, and we're all based in the North London area??!!

If I thought that the engineer could actually get to the bottom of this then I would consider asking an engineer to check it out. One of the problems I had with talking to Virgin Media service desk was that no one there had any technical expertise. No one could tell me how the Engineer would actually diagnose what had happened. I think I will call their technical lines tomorow to see if I can get a better picture of what the engineer might actually do. I consider what's happened here to be a criminal offence, effectively someone has stolen £26.90 from my accounts. What disappoints me is that Virgin Media do not appear to take this seriously. If I can't get it sorted then in the end I suspect that the only way I can voice that disappointment is to tell all my friends, fellow church goers, and colleagues what poor telephone service Virgin Media provides.

Having read through the Ofcom website it does not appear that Ofcom can take any action either. They can only monitor this situation.

Am also going to call Customer Relations 0845-454-1111 and Nuisance Call Bureau on 0800-953-3333 in the morning.

I wont be online for a week.....hope others will stick at it and get this sorted.

I wonder if anyone will be doing repairs inside the VM street cabinet round the corner.

I am still to hear about my complaint have been told I will hear something in 72 hours - strange but I'm from Winchmore Hill as well, is it just our area or is it wider?

Hmmm, I'm in Enfield and have been charged for a 21 minute call on the 17th September at 2:30PM.

I think an email to Watchdog via the BBC website could be worth a try.


Chris

Before going any further I decided to chat to a friend who works in the telecoms industry to try and understand how this could be done, and what, if anything the engineer could do to establish the truth of the matter.

What I learnt is that the most likely cause, is probably internal fraud. My friend also commented that because it was the same period of time, it could well be mechanical. Unfortunately I am guessing that such a fraud is not something that VirginMedia is likely to investigate because it simply isn't big enough.

I suspect that there is also little point in calling out the engineer to investigate. Unless someone has been obviously crocadile clipping wires onto our telephone cables in Enfield/Winchmore Hill, the engineer is not likely to discover anything that would vindicate our claims. Chances are that it will just land us with a £100 charge out call.  

I'm very interested in Ruth's post, to see what the outcome is. I also think that the Watchdog idea is interesting, and I also wondering, given how many here are from Enfield, whether it is worth email the Edfield Advertiser for a story?

I work for virgin media in the customer care department, and I've just had a call from a customer with this same number on his bill. He said he doesn't even have a phone connected to the line (I believe him because he hasn't made any calls since april). Reading through this string it all looks very odd. Chances are it's some sort of computer glitch, but to be honest I don't know enough about how it works to be sure. Regarding the technician call out charge, I'm sure you can appreciate that we do get a lot of customers saying that they didn't call the premium rate number on their bill, when it is quite clear they have. The charge is really just a scare tactic to make these people check with everyone in the house (usually their teenage son) if they've been calling the "adult lines". In theory we have the right to charge this, but in practise I have never seen this happen. To be honest there's not much point in speaking to customer relations (they'll just transfer you to customer care) or nuiscance call bureau (that's mainly for sales and marketing calls, and the calls are taken by customer care anyway). I'd say the best course of action is to get us to send the technician out. If you haven't made the calls, then we'll find the issue.