Virgin Media data breach court case: warning about deadlines!

It’s likely that a formal Virgin Media data breach court case will be established which will  then be used to manage the claimants as part of one action.

When this happens, there will usually be a court-imposed cut-off date for people to join the action. To benefit from the decisions made in the court case, including settlements, people will need to be a part of the action. For example, there may be an established Group Litigation Order (GLO).

Here’s a very important warning about making sure you join the action before any deadline hits. In fact, we urge you to take action now because missing the deadline is very easy, and it happens to thousands of people in many different actions.

Is there an established Virgin Media data breach court case?

There’s not yet an established Virgin Media data breach court case, such as a GLO. It’s likely that there will be one because there are 900,000 victims who could be eligible to claim, and we estimate that the total pay-out could reach the £4.5bn mark.

Instead of tens of thousands of individual cases being issued and pursued across courts all over the UK, it would be far more efficient for them to all join together. They can then pursue the case as one solid action, which is why there’s legislation in place for this to happen.

Use of the court process should be reserved for when it’s required. This means that it’s not a case of simply launching court action as soon as possible, it’s about doing so when all other options have been exhausted. It’s early days in the Virgin Media data breach compensation action, so we’re not yet at that stage.

When will the Virgin Media data breach compensation deadline be?

At this stage (April 2020), as there’s not yet a formal Virgin Media data breach court case, we cannot know for certain when the deadline may fall.

To give you a corresponding example, we launched action for victims of the British Airways data breach in September 2018. A formal GLO was established for that action in October 2019 when we were appointed, by order of the High Court of Justice, to the Steering Committee responsible for the overall conduct of the litigation. The deadline for people to join that action has been set as January 2021.

However, the Defendant did try to seal a short cut-off date of just 17 weeks. Although this was not put in place, you can’t say for sure that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen for future actions, including for the Virgin Media action.

Missing the deadline!

If a formal Virgin Media data breach court case is established and a deadline is in place, you don’t want to miss it.

Even when there are lengthy cut-off dates, people still miss the deadlines. With our firm being involved in over 50 group and multi-party actions in all, we’ve heard it all:

• “I’d rather wait to see what happens first”;
• “I’ve got plenty of time, I’ll think about it in the future”;
• “There’s no rush”;
• “It may not win so I’ll wait until a later time when it may win”.

When we’re offering No Win, No Fee representation, what have you got to lose in filing your claim right away?

But, in leaving it, you could leave it too late. You could then lose out on thousands of pounds in compensation!

A big case in point for you is the Volkswagen Emissions Scandal litigation that we were appointed to the Steering Committee for. The cut-off point for this action, set to be the biggest consumer action the UK has ever seen, passed some time ago. You may have heard that there was a key victory in recent days which may mean that VW’s defence is significantly weakened. Since then, we’ve received a huge influx of daily enquiries from people now wanting to claim. Some of those were in touch with us years ago but didn’t go ahead. Unfortunately, we cannot help them, as the deadline has long passed.

So, waiting to see what happens or waiting for a key decision like we’ve seen in the VW case can easily lead to you leaving it too late to claim.

The solution is simple: claim now to avoid missing out!

The content of this post/page was considered accurate at the time of the original posting and/or at the time of any posted revision. The content of this page may, therefore, be out of date. The information contained within this page does not constitute legal advice. Any reliance you place on the information contained within this page is done so at your own risk.