I recently discovered that with my Virgin Media package that I have for TV and Internet that I get free photos printed with Snapfish, which is great because now that I’ve made the transition to a digital camera I rarely get photos printed anymore.

Now, I phoned Virgin Media to find out how this worked and a very helpful woman explained it and said she’d send me an email with full instructions, which she promptly did.

All sounds great so far yeah? Well, this is a section of the email she sent. Bear in mind that she didn’t write this email just for me, it was a standard Virgin Media template email sent to potentially hundreds, maybe thousands of customers.

Spot the deliberate mistake…

If you’ve not been to My Virgin Media <http://myvirginmedia.com/dashboard/start>, you’ll need to log in with your main Virgin Media username and password, and go to My Stuff <http://myvirginmedia.com/vstuff/activate>  to activate it on your account. You can also download the software you’ll need here. You need to install it on your computer, and follow the on-screen instructions to choose which files you want to have backed up.

Did you notice it? No, I’m not alluding to the ‘and’ following the comma; I’m referring to a more dangerous mistake. The URL is wrong. To log in to Virgin Media you don’t visit http://myvirginmedia.com, you visit http://my.virginmedia.com – a subtle difference perhaps, but an entirely different website.

Virgin has been sending people to the wrong URL to login. Anyone who has followed their instructions and ‘logged’ in will have given over their username and passwords to a fake site, all because of Virgin Media’s own stupidity.

I did reply to them about this but received no response, so I’m afraid I have to out them here and let the world know. Virgin Media has been sending its customers to a spoof site in its own emails.

Pretty poor show wouldn’t you say?

Darren Jamieson

Darren Jamieson, aka MrDaz, is the Technical Director and co-founder of Engage Web and has been working online in a career spanning two decades. His first website was built in 1998 and is still live today.

    

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