Virgin Media has been hit with a £28 million fine after Ofcom found the company repeatedly made it harder for customers to cancel their contracts, using tactics designed to delay or prevent them from leaving.
The regulator found that between January 2022 and September 2024, millions of customer calls were likely mishandled. According to Ofcom, call centre staff deliberately hung up on customers, transferred them unnecessarily between departments, left them on hold “for no reason”, and repeatedly pressured them to stay rather than allowing them to cancel.
Far from being the work of a few rogue employees, Ofcom found the company’s commission system “effectively encouraged” these practices by financially rewarding staff for keeping customers locked into contracts. Virgin Media also operated a two-tier retention system in which only a second level of agents could actually process cancellations, forcing more than a million customers to repeat their requests before they could even begin the process of leaving.
This wasn’t simply poor customer service. It was the predictable result of a system where profit comes before people’s needs. Under capitalism, corporations don’t make money by serving customers well. They make money by extracting as much value as possible from workers and consumers alike. Every customer prevented from cancelling represented another stream of revenue flowing to shareholders.
Ofcom said it first attempted to resolve the issue informally in 2022, but according to the regulator there “wasn’t the will” within Virgin Media to fix the problem. Natalie Black, Ofcom’s group director for infrastructure and connectivity, described the company’s conduct as “pretty shocking” and said: “The facts are clear. Virgin Media made it harder for customers to cancel their contracts and then did not fully cooperate with our investigation.”
The regulator received 1,881 complaints from customers struggling to leave the company. Some became so frustrated they cancelled their direct debits instead, creating new problems including missed payments that damaged their credit scores.
Virgin Media admitted its failings and agreed to settle with Ofcom, reducing the penalty by 30%. The company apologised to the “small proportion who experienced an issue when contacting us to agree a new deal or cancel their service in the past” and claimed it has since overhauled its customer service operations. It also said complaints relating to customers leaving the company fell by 89% last year compared with 2023.
Ofcom says Virgin Media must now ensure every affected customer who complained has received the compensation or other remedies they are entitled to within six months.
The £28 million penalty is the largest fine Ofcom has ever issued under its consumer protection rules, though it still amounts to a tiny fraction of the revenues generated by one of Britain’s biggest telecommunications monopolies. The money won’t even go to those affected. Instead, it will be paid into the Treasury.
Cases like this expose one of capitalism’s central contradictions. Competition is often presented as a force that disciplines corporations and benefits consumers. In reality, companies spend enormous resources finding ways to stop customers exercising that choice whenever doing so threatens profits. Sales targets, commission structures and management directives all push workers to maximise revenue, even when that means misleading or obstructing the very people they’re supposed to serve.
It’s also worth remembering that this isn’t Virgin Media’s first major run-in with regulators. In 2025, Ofcom fined the company £23.8 million after thousands of vulnerable customers were left without access to potentially lifesaving telecare alarms during the digital switchover.
These scandals aren’t evidence that capitalism has somehow failed to regulate itself. They’re evidence of how it works. When profit is the overriding objective, every safeguard, every public service and every customer relationship is ultimately subordinated to the interests of capital. Workers in the call centres didn’t create the incentives that trapped customers. Executives and shareholders did, because squeezing every possible penny out of the public is exactly what the capitalist system rewards.
