Virgin Media fined £23.8m after putting vulnerable customers at ‘risk of harm’

Virgin Media has been fined £23.8 million by Ofcom after putting thousands of vulnerable customers at “direct risk of harm” when moving them to digital landlines.

A number of serious incidents took place when Virgin was upgrading its customers’ home phone services in November and December 2023, the media and communications watchdog said.

Virgin failed to properly identify and record the status of its “telecare” customers, who have emergency alarm systems that connect to a monitoring service – meaning those affected did not receive the right amount of support.

This meant their devices were prevented from connecting to alarm monitoring centres while their networks were disconnected, Ofcom found.

The watchdog said this put thousands of vulnerable customers, who were not engaged in the pro