Ofcom has fined Virgin Media £28 million for deliberately preventing customers from canceling their contracts.
It is the regulator’s largest ever fine under its consumer protection rules, and the facts behind it make for uncomfortable reading.
Between January 2022 and September 2024, millions of customer calls were likely mishandled.
Virgin Media operated a two-tier retention system in which only second-tier agents could actually process cancellations, forcing over a million callers to repeat themselves before they could even get the conversation started.
When customers did get through, agents would keep them on hold without reason, transfer them unnecessarily, and, in some cases, deliberately drop the call. Others simply failed to log the cancellation request at all.
To add insult to injury, it has been revealed that agents were financially incentivized to do it, with a commission scheme effectively rewarding staff for stopping customers from leaving.
Natalie Black, Ofcom’s Group Director for Infrastructure and Connectivity, did not mince her words:
“The facts are clear. Virgin Media made it harder for customers to cancel their contracts and then did not fully cooperate with our investigation. As a result, we are leveling our largest ever fine under our consumer protection rules for direct harm to consumers.”
This was not a gray area. It was a deliberate, institutionalized strategy to trap customers in contracts by weaponizing the cancellation process itself.
A Repeat Offender
What makes this particularly striking is that Virgin Media has been here before.
The company was fined under the same rule, Ofcom’s General Condition C1.8, in 2018. Ofcom also attempted to resolve the issue informally in 2022, at the very start of the period under investigation.
Black was pointed about what happened next: “There wasn’t the will to do that.”
So, for nearly three years, during the peak of the cost-of-living crisis, the company carried on.
Rocio Concha, Director of Policy and Advocacy at consumer group Which?, was unsparing in her assessment:
“It’s shocking that Virgin Media was deliberately making it harder for customers to leave for a better deal. This was a deeply cynical tactic at a time when so many households were struggling with cost-of-living pressures.”
Virgin Media, for its part, admitted its failings and settled, earning a 30% reduction on the fine.
A spokesperson pointed to Ofcom’s own data showing the company is now the least-complained-about broadband provider, with complaints specifically relating to difficulties leaving reportedly 89% lower last year than in 2023.
While that progress is worth acknowledging, detractors would point to the fact that it took a £28 million fine and close to a decade of regulatory pressure to get there.
The Bigger Problem
The Virgin Media case is an extreme example, but it is not an isolated one.
Friction-by-design, engineering the cancellation process to be as discouraging and difficult as possible, is a business model that has been running across industries for years.
The fine may be record-breaking, but the underlying behavior is far from rare.
In the U.S., the Biden administration took direct aim at this issue with its ‘Time is Money’ initiative, launched in 2024.
The multi-agency effort targeted hard-to-cancel subscriptions, excessive hold times, and chatbot runarounds, with the FTC’s click-to-cancel rule as its most significant output.
That rule would have required businesses to make cancellation no harder than signing up.
It was struck down by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals in July 2025 on procedural grounds. The broader initiative has since been wound down under the Trump administration, and a fresh FTC rulemaking process launched in March 2026 is still in its early stages.
Regulatory momentum in the U.S., for now, has stalled.
In the U.K., the picture is more promising, though not without its own frustrations.
The Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 includes a new subscription contracts regime that will require businesses across all sectors to enable online cancellation, ban contractual terms that make exit disproportionately difficult, and mandate renewal reminders before auto-renewals kick in.
Non-compliance could carry fines of up to 10% of global annual turnover. The regime has been delayed twice and is now expected to come into force in Spring 2027.
Ofcom’s One Touch Switch process, which launched in September 2024 and allows broadband customers to switch provider by contacting only their new one, offers a glimpse of what structural design change can look like. Over 1.6 million customers have already used it.
The Virgin Media fine sends a clear signal. But signals only go so far when the incentive to obstruct remains strong. The goal has to be making deliberate friction not worth the risk at all, and on that front, the regulatory framework is still catching up.
