This telephone recording was provided to me my a friend in Brisbane. His name’s not important, so let’s call him “Kurt” for the sake of this post. Earlier this week, Kurt was called by an overseas contact centre (easily identified by the audio compression and delay) purporting to be Microsoft and informing him that he needed to take immediate action to fix problems on his PC.
It was, of course, just another case of the well documented – but not necessarily known well enough – Microsoft phone support scam.
Kurt’s a smart bloke. Actually, he’s a *very* smart young bloke who engineers infrastructure that millions of us rely upon every day. There’s no way he’d fall for such a scam. So, with some time to spare, he decided to make the most of the scamster experience and recorded his playful banter.
He writes, in his email:
‘…I got the usual overseas call with “there’s a problem with your computer sir let me fix it” scammers.
Usually I hang up but I persisted. Told this guy I was running Windows 3.1 several times (but playing a dumb user) and that I was using a 486 Hewlett Packard.
I remembered, after about 20 minutes of pretend reboots and furious googling of Win 3.1 screens (not that it mattered as these guys didn’t have a clue despite all the hints… and being passed to ‘specialists’
, that I could put the home phone on speaker and record on the iPhone. Apologies for the soft sound at the start, I bumped the volume up during it…”
I suspect the call centre has now placed him on their own DO NOT CALL FOR ANY REASON list. 
http://www.ammammyyyy.com/ lmao!
btw…where is your +1 button?
“Too hard” basket.
I had a similar experience 2 weeks ago, the wife brings the phone downstairs loudly proclaiming ‘oh I’ll have to get my husband it’s his computer that’s infected I found touch it’
So from the comfort of my living room chair I proceeded to waste as much of this clowns time as possible
Prestending to be on a computer that blue screened twice during the call the caller just persisted in asking me ok what’s on the screen now.
Without having my idevices nearby I could not recall every menu option in the event viewer so I proceeded to come clean with him.
That I’m a qualified tech, your a scammer and should be ashamed. Etc etc
He even tried to tell me it’s not a scam then I said ok, then of you are from Microsoft, what’s my activation key?
Bloody scum, fooling those less savvy out of hundreds of dollars.
He eventually hung up
I know he would of just gone to the next number, but at least I kept him busy for a while
Hahah, I should upload my own version of one of these calls.
Granted it’s a touch over 2 hours *troll-smile*, but we had plenty of fun giving them access to a virtual machine, then a number of fake credit cards and paypal accounts among other things ^_^
This is absolutely GOLD. Love it!
hell microsoft i need help for halo 2 for the pc computer im run it on windows 7 i cant open the game can u help me ?
The Windows 3.1 on an HP 486 comment is pure gold. I would’ve loved to see the dumbfounded look on the guys face after your mate said that.
I did a similar thing with my Ubuntu PC. Funnily enough I couldn’t find any of the icons, or names or programmes he wanted. I did know it was called “LG Super Multi blue”, because that’s on the cup holder in the front. Must remember to say I’m a bit old next time.
I received a call from “microsoft” recently and the poor representative caught me on a ‘bad day’…. My response was to enthuse about having finally receiving the call I was expecting and would my computer really pop if I stroked if hard enough or would I need to trust harder to get the floppy working…. All this was said in a ‘bedroom’ voice…. I was so disappointed that he hung up on me but maybe the pressure got to him; after all my computer was probably better hung than he was. {snerk}