I tried to cancel Virgin Media broadband contract
virginmedia-is-evil.com
virginmedia-is-evil.com
In order to cancel Mediacom's 'service,' I had to send a letter[1] to them, with copies to their general counsel, threatening 99 kinds of lawsuit. I made the letter intentionally deranged, complete with footnotes about financial BDSM, to give them the impression that I would actually do it. They cancelled the account. It was pretty fun to ignore the panicked calls from their lawyers for a bit too.
Once I had to cancel an entire credit card to get out from under a gym membership.
I feel this is one of the great beauties of the internet. It's so much harder for companies to hide behind branding when they display bad behaviours.
They are actually heavily regulated. But they use that regulation as a way to prevent new competitors.
But most people in the UK sign-up to the Big Three ( BT Retail, Virgin, TalkTalk ) due to their intense advertising and bundle 'deals'. So those three consider themselves the market and compete with one another for that pool of customers. Naturally they make leaving difficult because they have spent so much on acquisition.
The other 20% of customers shop around based on individual requirements. I've been with my small, efficient ISP for 12 years and have no reason to change.
This brings back memories of one of my first jobs. I worked for a call center outsourcing company doing overnight tech support for a nationwide ISP that would advise you when you received mail. One of the things we did was to dump all calls into the same call queue after 2am in my time zone so the first four hours of my shift were normal technical support calls and the last six hours were everything, including billing.
The contract owners in Virginia were very motivated that we continue the heavy-handed "retention" efforts even in the generalist phone queue. I remember one script we were given for cancellations ran to fifteen pages, including notes and policies.
But one of the myriad nice things about working in the middle of the night is there are no managers around to give a shit and the on-shift Quality Assurance rep was an employee of my call center company, not of the big ISP like on other shifts, and the overnight QA people officially gave zero shits. If anyone wound up in the all-purpose queue asking to cancel, we'd all do it with minimal hassle because we hated the process as much as the soon-to-be-ex-customers.
(When Virginia rolled out new policies to "verify" script compliance, like flagging cancellations made on calls with a handle time under ten minutes--which is saying something in itself--we'd just put the customer on hold for 12 minutes to "process the cancellation" and go on a free break.)
I remember hearing about the scripts for those late-night-infomercial purchases.
"I want to buy the nose-hair clipper"
(efficient process to get card number)
but included in the purchase process were upsell scripts.
"I don't want to hear about this"
"but sir, many people get upset and call back because they missed these special offers!"
(etc for every possible escape route)
And if the call center person didn't follow the script, they would be fired.
Apparently the only way for the customer to escape the script would be to say "I will cancel my order unless you stop"
gah.
but then, how would you cancel that service?
They offered me as low as a three month contract with direct debit and I refused.
The guy signing me up thought I was nuts. I think everyone else is nuts.
https://www.directdebit.co.uk/DirectDebitExplained/pages/dir...
"It cannot be used to address contractual disputes between you and the billing organisation. "
There's a reason these lot link your account to your credit rating and good luck escaping them even with a regulator judgement in your favour, because they'll just ignore that too.
I don't know what it is with customer service, whether it's just the low pay or if there's something else at play that explicitly selects for the dumbest idiots on the planet or is it the working conditions that cause their mental abilities to deteriorate so much?
It's terrible, and should be illegal.
When I rang during that month, they then told me I had to give a month's notice and would be charged for an extra month.
Took me a few hours of phone calls to eventually get that dropped.
A good consumer protection law would be some requirement that cancelling a service is similar in friction to signing up for that service (obviously vague, but you get my point). You shouldn't be allowed to require a phone call to cancel a service.
Oh, this was also while I was in Cambridge and I was getting dial-up speeds regularly on my fibre line because they were so oversubscribed, while I was still getting leaflets through the door telling me to sign up for their service. It shouldn't be legal to advertise a service you don't have the capacity to actually provide, and still take people's money for it.
I remember one time I rang about it, explained and the guy went "I'll just look up and see if we have any congestion issues". After a few seconds, I heard him go "holy shit" away from the receiver, then come back to me and just start apologising and saying he could see why I'd have a problem.
Doesn’t matter how many times I point out to him he has fibre to the cabinet not the home.
I think both BT and Virgin should have been reined in years ago on their outlandish claims.
Personally, I tend to start any call with a customer support person with something like "Hello, I'm calling about an existing account, would you like the account number?". Almost invariably, they will say yes and then do a couple of checks to confirm my identity for data protection purposes.
At this point they know exactly who I am, and they probably ask why I'm calling. If I'm asking to change or cancel something, I state that immediately, so now they have a record of both my identity and my request.
By now, I'll also have a pretty good idea of whether I'm talking to a human being who is interested in helping me or some call centre automaton who's just going to be awkward and stick to a script.
If they then try to give me the run around, I just repeat that I've informed them of my details and my wish to change/cancel, if necessary state that I'll be cancelling payment authority accordingly, and then tell them I'm ending the call.
If possible, I'll also keep a recording of the call (which is legal in my country) but at the very least I'll make an immediate written record of the time of the call, who I spoke to, and what was said.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wells_Fargo_account_fraud_scan...
I've heard the customer service is bad, but to be honest, I never need it speak to them. On the whole, a happy customer over the last 18 years (whoever they were when I signed up in 2002- NTL? Cable& Wireless?)
These call centre staff must be very highly skilled, wolf of wall Street level of hustle.
In Korea they have a word which describes a person who is easily scammed and parted away from their cash: hugu.
I now have the opposite problem, I'd like to upgrade my package and get a higher uplink speed, but the website just throws a generic error if I try to view upgrades available to my account. I'm not bothered enough to pick up the phone yet.
I imagine they don't offer such functionality because they're making quite a bit of money off of people who would downgrade or quit if they had an easier way of doing it. Outside of regulation forcing their hand, I don't ever see a company making this sort of thing easier.
I would probably use that again in the future, even if it were a lie.
Any business that is causing trouble at my expense still gets one polite attempt to contact them via their preferred means and a reasonable chance to respond, but usually only one. I'm not hanging around on the phone for more than a few minutes or waiting more than a couple of working days for a substantial response to an online message.
My next contact is normally now a recorded delivery letter sent to their registered address, which here in England is something any business with the typical legal structure must have as a matter of public record and where mail sent to it must be read. I set out my grievance, what I want them to do about it, and often at this point some compensation I want for the problem and/or subsequent trouble getting it dealt with, in a form that can become the start of a formal legal action if necessary.
This strategy has generally been enough to get whatever the problem was resolved reasonably quickly and without any further messing around. I suspect this is because anything that turns up in that form and is potentially relevant to a real legal action automatically gets passed to the business's legal team to deal with. The legal team presumably then has both the awareness to recognise a legitimate grievance and the authority to do something about it rather than let it escalate.
I don't like that this seems to have become necessary to get a reasonable response from a lot of large businesses today, but fortunately for all of us in my country, there isn't actually any obligation to play by the business's rules in a dispute if they're giving us the run-around.
(Even better if you really do have a team of lawyers willing to work on contingency to take these sure-bet claims to court if necessary—just their existence would be an extra layer of deterrence.)
In general, I don't allow companies messing me around to profit from it. Even if it takes longer than it is worth, I make a point of principle that I somehow get more back from them than I was cheated out of or they neglected to deliver. Usually this ends up costing them much more than just behaving reasonably in the first place. I find finding a way to do this cathartic. It isn;t always entirely legal though.
If more people did this, it wouldn't be worth companies messing people around.
Reviews mentioned this and the official reply was to contact them for a refund. I did but multiple times but they alternated between ignoring me and refusing. Eventually I gave up. I no longer buy anything from HarperCollins.
Cancelling the payment and explaining the situation to the subsequent debt collector (who was very reasonable and understood the situation) was the only thing that worked.
One thing that I've known several people to do (with considerable success in practice) is include a statement in that letter to the effect that sending that letter is free of charge, but any subsequent actions you reasonably take due to the company's incompetence will incur a clearly stated and proportionate administration fee and/or require compensation for any expenses incurred and other consequential losses. As I understand it, as long as you're reasonable in what you say you'll claim from them, this can be legally enforceable, particularly if the business imposes similar conditions itself as part of its contractual terms, which many do. Certainly I've seen several major businesses end up paying out a small amount of compensation in these situations when the matter was finally settled. This can also be helpful for getting a problem escalated to someone who can deal with it sensibly, because random front-line customer relations staff probably don't have the authority to incur expenses on behalf of the business.
I'm not affiliated with them in any way. They just have a great reputation for good technical knowledge, privacy, and support.
Edit: as an example, a bunch of years back I detected a routing loop. Emailed them the traceroute. Got a response back in a few minutes saying they were looking into it, and it was fixed shortly afterwards. So nice to be able to communicate with someone who can actually fix problems. The only other times I've had to contact them have been related to diagnosing problems in the underlying BT copper (not really their problem), and they were super helpful there too.
Ironically, the one major exception to this is Virgin, because they do offer an alternative product with technical advantages, whereas almost every other landline ISP is ultimately just backed by the same physical BT infrastructure. But given the speeds you can get in most parts of the country from that BT infrastructure now, the difference isn't going to be as important for most people as it used to be a few years ago.
I'd used Zen about ten years earlier and they'd been much better, so I was very disappointed.
My experience with Virgin was fine. The product was fast, there were a couple of short outages but no serious technical issues, and I had no problem cancelling when I moved a few years ago.
It's true that Zen are relatively expensive, though, and their lack of 24/7 support is still well below par. A&A would be the obvious alternative to consider if we were moving again or decided to change ISP for some reason.
AA or Zen simply can't compete when they are offering FTTC or ADSL.
I don't care at all about customer service. If you're contacting your ISP enough to care about the customer service, they must be doing something wrong.
Virgin Media currently offers speeds of up to 500mbps across their entire network. That will be 600mbps at the start of next month, and it's 1000mbps in some places (such as Reading).
So the speed is the same as any ADSL provider: 70 down, 15 up or so.
Edit: to clarify, I'm saying they don't singularly operate on the copper ADSL component of the open reach network.
Edit: here's the graphs from the A&A control page for my line for the last week. These are really helpful figuring out what's going on if anything is strange. You can see that the mean RTT doesn't really move off the bottom axis, and the peak RTT pretty much never exceeds 50ms. http://nrg.cs.ucl.ac.uk/mjh/tmp/latency.png
Can confirm. They are awesome! You can see network logins/logouts for the last 12 hours.
I love the email I get whenever my connection has dropped, and the next email 30 seconds later after reconnection.
Absolute genius.
EDIT: Check out their network status page: https://aastatus.net/
That's throughout the day as well. Never noticed any issue with peak time usage.
Regularly get about 30ms ping when playing CS:GO.
If I could get FTTP, I would, but I think that was dependent on openreach.
Also not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy customer.
Coincidentally, I switched to them once I managed to break free from Virgin. The major selling point for me: Lifetime price guarantee. After being with Virgin for 3 years and tolerating 2 price bumps, that was a breath of a fresh air.
Yes, the speeds are nowhere near what Virgin is offering, but for me, all the speed in the world cannot make up for obnoxious customer service, the terrible security and the shady practices they use to keep you handcuffed to them.
One of the biggest resentments I have against Virgin is that you need the business package to support some types of VPN. Like the VPN in use by my lab. Static IPs? Business account. Anything useful? Business account.
That and the woeful password security practices they force on users. Letters, numbers and between 8-10 length? For the account login?!
AA on the other hand will generate a secure and memorable passphrase for you, which you can override but has to be tiptop secure to do that. There's even a button for "whoops, someone else could see my screen, please generate a new passphrase again".
I mean, who does that?! Genius.
Then there's the logs which relate to my account. I can see exactly what openreach have said about work on my account. When an openreach engineer was assigned and exactly what they're doing etc.
Honestly, if I buy a house, a deciding factor will probably be whether I can have AA as my ISP.
Further more, their stance on internet censorship is laudable ("The Government says we have to offer customers a choice of censored internet. So here's your choice, if you want censorship pick another ISP.")
> The company's owner, Adrian Kennard (RevK), stated in a blog post that as of October 2010 the company is "xkcd/806" compliant, referring to xkcd comic number 806. This means that technical support callers who say the code word "shibboleet" will be transferred to a technical support representative who knows at least two programming languages, and presumably can offer more useful advice than a standard tech support script.
They're expensive, they have a data cap (but it's generous), and don't currently offer the higher g.fast or FTTP speeds, but:
- the support is consistently excellent and no-nonsense, and there's no upselling or questionable sales tactics
- phone calls are usually answered within seconds by someone who can actually help and doesn't just have a script, and they'll even give support over IRC if you want
- easy access to extra fixed v4 and v6
- they support the Open Rights Group, and have a clear stance against internet censorship
I've been a customer for over a decade now, and I still have no intention of leaving. Good CS on the odd occasion I need it more than makes up for the cost for me.
Only thing I'd love to see is access to faster FTTP speeds (330/50)!
(Edit: I forgot, I had also sent recorded delivery mail about it, but got no response).
I eventually got it resolved by finding the number for the CEO's secretary or someone, and harassing them about it until they got it sorted.
Now, the same thing has happened with Virgin Media Business at work (I cancelled because it was always going down, including the PSTN phones, the service was awful and we no longer need it - we had it before I joined, they have been billing us for months after we cancelled).
Worst ISP ever.
You should post said number publicly so others can cancel more easily.
First they said "health and safety", they can't get a man to bring the cable up to 2nd floor. I said fine, how about I buy that cable, I drill my own walls, and bring you the cable down to the ground, can you connect that? "Sure, let's set up a date for engineer visit". All is ready, engineer comes carrying a modem... wtf... you are supposed to connect this to your box outside the property. He goes back, they cancel my request for service outright. I call them, and an utterly rude person tells me that the cancellation is final, there is no one to complain to, I can't talk to his manager, goodbye.
The UK broadband is in such an appalling state, that if you want better than ADSL you have to subject yourself to humiliation by Virgin Media who hold near monopoly over fast (for UK, anyway) lines as BT/Openreach are utterly disinterested in being part of the 21st century.
The day this ridiculous duopoly is broken up will be the day to rejoice! But I'm not holding my breath, this is a 3rd world country is so many ways that matter. (Actually, that's an insult to "3rd world" - there I got an actual 100/100Mbit ethernet connection installed in a matter of days for half the money Virgin is asking for their slowest service).
Agreed, it is terrible. I ended up going with an enterprise-grade leased line that costs ~400£/month because that was the only choice besides Virgin, but honestly I'd rather be paying that much and know it pays fair wages to honest people then pay less but having it go in scammers' pockets.
Thankfully in London there is Hyperoptic and G.Network who offer real fibre (none of this fake fibre DSL or cable bullshit) at an affordable price (~50/month) so I'll switch to them as soon as they become available.
I would switch to Hyperoptic in a heartbeat but they are not rolling out to north London any time soon. Funny how in Scotland even Vodafone is rolling out a gig network, while in bloody London I still can’t get better than adsl speeds.
I suspect this depends a lot on the installer. When my grandparents had it installed, they ran it up the drive, straight over the top of the house, then down the back wall and into the house there without an issue.
Contrast this with when my parents had it installed (after my grandparents, so we assumed it would be fine) - we had about four weeks of back and forth saying "Hey, you've buried the cable on someone else's land and they're about to dig it up" (instead of following the edge of the property, they just cut diagonally across, and the neighbours had planning permission to build there). They eventually sorted it, but it must have taken a double digit number of calls and threats not to pay. IIRC, they were the only option for >38Mbps service, so we didn't have a great deal of choice.
This is London, all installers of everything suffer from vertigo
I'd love to blame monopolies (sure, pick the other guys, but you'll be back in a few years when they piss you off) but the other big offender here is gym memberships, and there's no shortage of choice there. I think there's at least 4 different brands within a 5 minute drive of my house.
Consumer protection laws should be: You can cancel anywhere you can sign up. You allow new signups online, over the phone, and mall kiosks? Great, you also allow cancellations online, over the phone, and mall kiosks.
When adding a customer exit survey to our cancellation workflow the hard and fast requirements were "you cancel first, you need to understand that the cancellation has been completed. Then we can show you the survey". Don't be jerks, then hopefully people will remember you fondly if they need you later.
And just like with ISPs, all of them are equally scummy, so it is indeed a monopoly/oligopoly of scumminess.
UK has fairly good consumer protection laws, in fact if you express your intent to cancel, they refuse for an invalid reason or ignore it and you cancel the payment and let the "debt" accumulate there isn't anything else they can do besides threatening letters, a black mark on your credit report (which can be removed with enough effort) or debt collectors (who are actually reasonable and will drop the matter once you explain the situation).
They could go to court, but they won't because 1) they know they are in the wrong and 2) it's not worth their time anyway. The mark on the credit report is pretty much the only leverage they have, and unfortunately it works due to most people either being afraid of it or actually relying on easy access to credit.
ie once you’ve stated you want cancel and they’ve ignored it could you bill them for your time?
Eventually, our contract expired and got auto-renewed to a more expensive one (because the one we were on didn't exist anymore). So every month we're paying for something we don't need, like TV etc, and we don't have a choice because there's only Virgin where we are.
I emailed, then they replied and admitted fault, apologised, and refunded me. No sitting in phone queues, no treating me like a criminal.
Unfortunately looks like they got bought and shut down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Un_Limited
Seems like the good guys lose in this business.
They had a terrible reputation even then, but it was that or Sky.
As far as I know you can create virtual credit cards on the fly and use them to pay. So you could have one with which you pay your Streaming Subscription, one with which you pay for Cable, et cetera and their pitch was exactly this: You can destroy the virtual credit card and there is no fear of any fees whatsoever, so when you cancel some subscription or something...
I didn't follow up at that time, but made a mental note. Has anyone any experience with such services? It's funny that the 'fear' of cancellations not working and being charged 'unlawfully' was the main pitch in the commercial I've seen. Also funny: Cable and Mobile Phone providers are the same devils in the US than in Europe it seems ...
Perhaps the reason they are is specifically to enable these distasteful collections practices?
But as far as I understand not paying for a contract may result in damaged credit history, so the mortgage can become more expensive for example; or they may sell your "debt" to some collector company, who may start bothering you (I heard these stories from friends).
So because of these reasons, I decided to try to explicitly cancel the contract instead of just stopping paying them.
It would be awesome, but the very business model of these companies relies on things not being awesome. I can imagine that a significant chunk of their revenue comes from disgruntled customers that have no choice but to pay even if they've been wronged because they don't want the hit on their credit report (even though it can be removed with enough effort).
I actually think that overall the companies probably do lose more money (in both PR/customer goodwill as well as support & debt collection costs) due to these scummy practices but too many people within the company rely on things being the way they are to get paid, so they have no incentive by themselves to improve things.
For example, allowing easy subscriptions/cancellations online would remove the need for a sales and "retentions" team as well as the multiple layers of management above them. Making contracts cancel automatically removes the need for debt collection and all the management around that and so on.
Of course, you should always aim to cancel properly, but if the company is intentionally being obtuse and you've made reasonable attempts to cancel "within the rules" then just cancelling the payment is a valid option.
'if they don't make it easy to cancel the service, just stop the payment, wait for the debt collectors, reason with them instead of your provider, they treat you better'
(I am not necessarily recommending that, but ... this speaks volumes)
How do they defend the lawsuit when the customer provides proof that they did a reasonable attempt at canceling within the rules and were stonewalled?
https://www.ftccomplaintassistant.gov
When I had an ongoing problem with an ISP that they claimed resolved multiple times in the past, all I had to do was say I was on this website and my issue was immediately escalated and fixed in no time.
Don't be afraid to use the TIO. ISPs get away with way too much crap here, and you'll find all your problems (I'm looking at you Telstra) are magically fixed extremely quickly once the TIO are involved.
With Centurylink they seem to just add random services once a year, and I only catch it after 2-3 months of it being on my bill.
Reddit seems to think Hyperoptic is where it's at. With VM as second. That's on raw speed front.
So if VM can't be trusted I guess I need to apartment hunt by Hyper...sigh.
However you have little to no choice in the UK.
FTTP is only absolve in specific buildings if your building isn’t connected it’s virgin or xDSL via Openreach (pick your ISP at that point however they are pretty much all the same unless you pick Tesco Broadband or some other small scale crap like that so for DSL I would got with Zen or well BT).
The other alternative is a leased FTTP line but you’ll be looking at high 4 to low to mid 5 figures for connecting you plus a hefty monthly fee.
So if you want good fiber for cheap you need to look for properties which are already connected to HO or GN.
The voucher scheme covered it for 2,5k which is a bit steep but also not that expensive in the grand scheme of things if you own your property. The monthly fee is around 400/month (unlike consumer plans, those are negotiable, I negotiated mine down to 384/month including VAT).
G.Network costs me £22 a month for 1gig no caps, there is another small fee for a real IP address since pretty much all FTTP providers use CGNAT.
That said the cost of a real IP address is £5 a month with HyperOptic and I think 40 or £50 a year with G.Network so it’s still cheaper than a VDSL connection despite being 15 times faster unless you are in the 200mbit areas of BT.
My new flat is connected to DSL, which has 70Mbps which is enough for 4K HD streaming and practically enough for everything. Even Stadia plays smoothly. Not perfect, but agreeing on DSL option gives much more freedom to choose a flat.
Good luck with looking for a place to live!
Checking an address on their website will require active BT phone line at the address, but if you call them up they can check the area for you (I did that).
I was asking their salesperson about static IPs addresses and all sorts. Answered every single one of my question with legit technical information.
I was actually speechless at the end of the first call. Was the first time I've spoken to an ISP and had all of my questions answered.
Didn't want a phone line and they didn't require one, 300GB usage as standard per month (can be upped to 2TB for a tenner I think?). They dont filter content on their network either. Speeds are decent enough for one person on FTTC (just got 70Mbps). And apparently they purchase above and beyond the capacity they might need from openreach to avoid peak time drains on the network (I've experienced none).
They also do FTTP as well. Or there's the G.Fast option which seems to be new (wasn't there when I ordered).
One of the things that still amazes me - they send me an pgp signed email whenever my internet connection drops, and another when it comes back online. If it's dropped overnight, I wake up to an email about it!
Then there's the amazing logs which you can see about your order. I can actually see the status of any issues relating to my account -- including what openreach may have logged about it!
Had a dodgy moment when initially setting up the router (unexpected downtime on their end).
Called support and they answered straight away - and it turned out to be the person I was emailing when purchasing my order! Knew I was doing set up, quickly checked logs and we got it all worked out.
No major issues since then. Only issue is the socket in my flat, but that's an openreach engineer job.
If they've got fiber at whatever place I'll definitely have a good look. Currently on a 1gbps unlimited package so would prefer not to stray too far from that to be honest. Though 500 would functionally be the same I guess
In that time they have had a couple outages of a few hours, nothing unusual compared to other ISPs. Their 100 and 500Mbit plans are nicely priced. I went for 1Gbit even though I barely break 300-400 over Wifi, just in case. Plus my previous Internet was an atrocious 6Mbit ADSL1 line which I was completely fed up with, so instinctively just wanted the most bandwidth I could get!
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/07/12/predatory-ios-app-subscri...
Why not sending a cancellation letter (recommended - not sure what the US word for this is, the kind of letter the other party signs when receiving it and which is a legal way to provide letters) and blocking the payments?
In England this isn't the recommended way to serve legal documents, because the person receiving can just refuse to sign and refuse to accept the letter.
You can send letters and get proof of posting without signed for delivery, and that's seen by the courts as good enough.
We have both kind of letters in France (with sig and without). I just checked (https://blog.bureaudeposte.net/quelle-difference-entre-un-en...) and they have the same value.
In some cases the "with sig" is recommended
Does anyone have experience with this method?
So please use chargebacks. I speak as a former merchant: We hate chargebacks - they are an effective deterrent.
I picked that domain because Virgin Media domain is .com: virginmedia.com (Virgin Media provides internet only in the UK).
They did do that.
But, the issue is if it accumulates without a resolution, it'll reflect badly on your credit score.
Been a mostly happy customer for over a year, contract has ran out so I was just paying month to month and didn't "upgrade" to another contract as I knew I was going to switch providers (already signed the contract with the new provider but it would've taken 6 month to actually install it).
Finally new provider gives me an install date so I call Virgin to cancel. First off, despite telling me that the cancellation will take 30 days (as mentioned in every document), I come home to find the broadband disconnected already. Fine, it's only a couple days until the new provider is up and running.
The new provider has an issue and it's going to take another few months to install, so I call back Virgin and ask if they can reinstate the previous connection. They say no so I ask them if they can give me the same plan on a 30-day rolling contract, explaining my situation and that I only intend to use it for a few months until the new provider is up and running (so even if they somehow missed the "30-day rolling contract" part, they would still realize it doesn't make sense to sign me up for a yearly contract given I intend to cancel in a few months). We confirm everything over the phone, the engineer comes in and gives me the new modem (why they couldn't just mail me the modem or let me reuse the old one is beyond me) and all is fine.
New provider is set up 2 months later so I give Virgin a call to cancel. Turns out, not only is my new contract a yearly contract but apparently they've sent me an e-mail stating the new contract and terms and that I opened it, despite the fact that my e-mail client doesn't load remote content so even if I did receive it there would be no way for them to know that I opened it, so they're either lying or they sent it to someone else. I argue with the customer support monkey for an hour and we get nowhere, so I ask them to review the call recordings from the call where I initially set up the contract and tell them to call me back the next day. They say they can't promise that and sure enough, no call back.
I end up writing a complaint letter by post explaining the situation and asking for a call back to sort out the situation, and cancel the direct debit on my bank's side. The letter also states that I will hold the equipment (modem) for a month and if I don't receive a shipping label by then I will discard it. No response despite the letter having been delivered and signed for.
Account goes to collections so I explain the situation to them and they are being very reasonable (you know it's a problem when your collections agency has better customer service than your own one) and drop the matter.
6 months later I get a prepaid shipping label in the mail to return the equipment... well it's a bit too late now though as the equipment is well on its way to the landfill. No news since then and I'm quite happy to never have to deal with that disgusting company again.
There's probably a black mark on my credit report because of this, but thankfully I don't need credit anytime soon so their only leverage didn't work out either. If the mark ends up being a problem I'll get a lawyer to send them a nastygram to get it removed.
then - no joke - a few days later i get an email that my comcast starter kit would be coming in the mail. THEY signed me back up! i called and it was explained to me as "oh, it looked like someone cancelled your plan in error". i was astounded. they then sent me to a comcast store that had been closed for years to return the modem, which i couldn't ship. i was about ready to throw the modem through the storefront at this point when i finally drove 30 minutes to an open location.
i will _never_ use anything comcast again. i feel so sorry for any poor souls that have no other option. i would not live anywhere it was my only option, that's how much i loathe them.
Not giving a shit about your credit score and not living off credit (which is a problem for a ton of other reasons) is the only way to thwart that and personally it's been a highly successful strategy for me.
No mortgages, can't rent from a lot of landlords, can't ever borrow money at decent rates if you need to. Some employers even check your credit.
Even if you don't think you will ever want any of those things, you might change your mind in the future.