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. 
