I had a conversation with a scammer claiming to be MSFT support, maybe 5-6 years back. It was clearly a cold call, not based on any PII, so I just toyed along for maybe a half hour until I started getting bored. We talked another 10 minutes or so about life in his city, lack of jobs, using fake tech support as a stepping stone, practicing english, siblings, etc. Seemed like the same familiar monotonous daily grind, just trying to find a path and provide. Maybe that was all an act too, but it felt authentic.

There are a few Twitch streamers doing this. I saw one that had a VM set up with all sorts of fuckery built-in to mess with them.

Yeah one guy has sound effects (such as driving for going to the store to buy the gift cards) and voice modification set up.

There was a video that he kept the scammer on the phone for 6+ hrs then at the end when he was giving them the apple cards was "confused" and redeemed $20000 dollars onto "her" "own" account to send them a computer all on a vm where they could watch her putting in the cards codes and go through the checkout but the control software "was broken" so they couldn't interfere.

edit: Youtuber/twitch streamer is mentioned below, Kitboga

Obligatory kitboga mention: https://twitch.tv/kitboga. The dude is a genius at baiting scammers and his stream is family-friendly as far as I know.

Then there is Jim Browning on YouTube.... I’ll just leave this here: https://youtu.be/le71yVPh4uk

Yea, some of those are hilarious to watch actually. I can't sit there for that long. But I would say on average I can easily waste 10 minutes of someone's time while still getting work done on my side.

> I'd like to think that if enough people did this they wouldn't make any money.

The population density and average income disparity between the US and India works strongly in their favor, however.

kitboga does this on Twitch, Jim Browning also has a bunch of YouTube videos of doing this. There's even a community for it on reddit: /r/scambait/