Virgin Media, the company behind Virgin Bingo, has sacked some of its employees in relation to illegal gambling in which the UK Gambling Commission has conducted extensive investigations. The enquiries, which have been concluded this week, followed suspicious betting patterns by Virgin employees.

The ex-employees had used their access to Virgin’s data in order to place more than £16,000 worth of bets on results of the X Factor contestants. The illegal gambling was raised when Betfair’s Integrity Unit reported suspicious betting patterns.

The Gambling Commission, having investigated the matter stated that a voiding order would be applied, the first of its kind under the UK Gambling Act of 2005. The Commission which has worked alongside with Ofcom, expects Virgin Media to ensure that firm steps are taken to prevent a repeat of such activity.

“Following a multi-agency investigation led by the Gambling Commission, we are satisfied that the bets placed were substantially unfair as the individuals involved had inside information. We have worked closely with all the bodies involved to ensure that those individuals do not profit from their activity and that appropriate action has been taken to prevent a recurrence of such activity in the future,” stated Nick Tofiluk, Director of Regulation at the UK Gambling Commission.

Virgin Media have added through a company spokesperson that: "We can confirm this was an isolated incident where three individuals were found to have misused their legitimate access to internal data to identify the volume of calls being made. At no point was any individual customer data shared and the outcome of the phone votes was not affected. However we have since introduced additional monitoring to our systems to ensure this cannot happen again."