Christopher Hamilton

It seems that my home Virgin Media telephone has been hacked.

we bought the telephone/internet bundle, which is cheaper than buying cable internet from them on it’s own, but had no real need for the phone. So after agreeing with the engineer that we would stick with that bundle but just not have a phone line installed. That would mean there would be no extra charges each month, and we would only have to pay the set price for using the internet.

Last month, however, the bill was a little more than normal, and upon investigation we found that someone had been making calls from our number. I spoke with Virgin Media customer service and the problem was resolved, and all the extra cost was removed from our bill.

I thought everything would be fine from that point, until Saturday evening when our internet went down. I was spending most of the weekend out of the flat so I didn’t really get around to calling them until Monday morning. Just before I called them, the monthly bill came through the door and was a whopping £135. WTF!!

I called them up to find out what had gone on and to have the charges removed. It was at this point I discovered that another £300+ had been added to our account since the bill was sent out, and the reason our internet access was down was because our account had been suspended due to what looked like suspect activities.

Needless to say I was not impressed. I logged a formal complaint, since I was assured that it wouldn’t happen again after the last time, and also because as of this moment we still have no internet access. They have to run an investigation to see what’s actually happened, and how and why our phoneline has been hacked.

The timing is crappy. I’m off work on holiday at the moment, which means I’ve been spending the last few days at home completely off line. It’s very frustrating. Then because I head off on holiday to Lanzarote tomorrow afternoon, if it’s not resolved before then I have to leave all the details with one of my flatmates to take care of, which may cause problems if there’s anything they ask about that only I would know.

Here’s hoping they figure out why this has happened as quickly as possible and get us back online. Then hopefully we won’t have any dodgy Luxemburg or Super Premium numbers showing up on a phone bill of ours again.