Virgin Media has been slapped with a hefty £23.8 million fine by Ofcom for putting thousands of vulnerable customers at “direct risk of harm” during their transition to digital landlines.

The media and communications watchdog reported that several serious incidents occurred during Virgin’s upgrade of its customers’ home phone services in November and December 2023. The telecoms giant failed to correctly identify and record the status of its “telecare” customers, who rely on emergency alarm systems that connect to a monitoring service, resulting in these affected customers not receiving the necessary support. This oversight led to their devices being unable to connect to alarm monitoring centres while their networks were disconnected, according to Ofcom’s findings.

Ofcom stated that this negligence put thousands of vulnerable customers, who were not involved in the process of upgrading their phone lines, at direct risk of harm.

For breaching Ofcom’s consumer protection rules, Virgin was fined £23.8 million.

Ian Strawhorne, Ofcom’s director of enforcement, said: “It’s unacceptable that vulnerable customers were put at direct risk of harm and left without appropriate support by Virgin Media during what should have been a safe and straightforward upgrade to their landline services.”

He added: “Today’s fine makes clear to companies that if they fail to protect their vulnerable customers, they can expect to face similar enforcement action.”

Virgin now has four weeks to pay the fine, which will subsequently be passed on to the Treasury.

The fine was determined based on the severity of the breach and the vulnerability of the affected customers, as well as Virgin’s self-reporting of the incident and admission of its shortcomings.

A representative for Virgin said that since 2023, the company has updated its procedures and implemented additional safeguards to better serve vulnerable customers.

The firm said: “While historically the majority of migrations were completed without issue, we recognise that we didn’t get everything right and have since addressed the migration issues identified by Ofcom.”

This includes a comprehensive support package for vulnerable customers, featuring improved communication, additional at-home assistance, thorough checks after the switchover, and participation in a nationwide awareness campaign.

The company also emphasised the necessity of transitioning its customers to digital services from traditional analogue landlines, which are “less reliable and difficult to maintain”.

Richard Branson, one of the UK’s most successful business minds, has revealed one of the biggest failures of his career after being ‘kneecapped by Coca-Cola’ following a provocative stunt.

The Virgin magnate has conquered the record label business, the media and travel markets and has even entered space on his Virgin Galactic venture but there is one ill-fated 90s effort he still wonders ‘what if?’ over.

Not many would be brave, or daft, enough to enter the soft drinks industry with corporate monolith Coca-Cola, one of the world’s most recognisable brands, reportedly taking up almost half of the entire market space.

However, that’s exactly what Branson did in 1994 when he launched Virgin Cola, a carbonated soft drink launched by his Virgin Group as a direct challenger to Coca-Cola and other rivals such as Pepsi, initially finding success in the UK.

Speaking to American journalist Graham Bensinger in 2021, Richard Branson, who has an estimated net worth of £2billion today, admitted Virgin Cola was his biggest failure but placed some of the blame on tactics used by Coca-Cola.

“I suspect the most notable failure has been not knocking Cola-Cola off their pedestal…we had a good try,” the London-born billionaire admitted with a grin.

“For a year or two, it looked like we were going to take Coca-Cola for everything they had. We were outselling them in Britain in all the retailers [where] we were stocked, and we were outselling Pepsi.

“I then got a bit too big for my boots and I arrived in Times Square with a Sherman Tank…crushed all these Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans…then turned the tank to the Coca-Cola sign in the middle of Times Square.”

Richard and his team had ‘pyrotechnics up’ the Coca-Cola sign the night before, without telling anybody, in the publicity stunt which helped launch Virgin Cola in the U.S., on May 12, 1998.

“Coke didn’t take that too kindly,” he laughed during his interview with Bensinger, before outlining the fierce tactics used by Coca-Cola to exact revenge.

“The next day in Atlanta headquarters, they [Coca-Cola] got bags and suitcases full of money…arrived in England, and retailers suddenly became very wealthy and all our Virgin Cola disappeared off the shelves.

“They kneecapped us very systematically, and we did not know this was going on.”

To kneecap a rival company means to deliberately sabotage or weaken the competition, and Richard seems to have got over the original disappointment.

“I would ring up Tesco and say, ‘What are you doing? You’ve taken Virgin Cola off all the shelves.’ And they would come up with some excuse, so it wasn’t until about a year later that a lady arrived who announced to me that she was the new manager of Virgin Group at Lloyds Bank.

“We went out for dinner, and it turned out she was the lady at Coca-Cola at the time who’d been in charge of the kneecapping exercise…and now she was my bank manager.”

Virgin Cola struggled on in the UK for several years after the incident, eventually ceasing domestic distribution by 2009 and globally by 2014.

By this time, Branson and Virgin were well into their space tourism operation, as well as other media, hospitality and charitable ventures.