The phone rang yesterday when I was expecting a call, so I picked up.

“Hello, this is Windows technical department.” The usual scam, to which I gave my usual answer.

“No, it’s not. This is a scam. You take money from old people and confused people. Don’t you have any grandparents?”

That’s usually enough to get them to hang up. But this time, a young man with a deep voice and a South Asian accent said hesitantly, “Yes, I have grandparents.”

“Okay,” I said. “Would you scam them out of their money? Especially when they might not have as much as they need.”

“This is not a scam, I don’t think,” he said.

“Try googling ‘Windows technical department scam,’” I said. “I guess you’ve had to take a pretty lousy job. But do you know your bosses are scamming millions of dollars out of people? I don’t imagine you see very much of that.”

“I’ve only worked here for two days on a six-month contract. I don’t think it’s a scam, however.”

“Try googling,” I said, ready to hang up. I was working, after all. I mean, doing the usual staring out the window and at the carpet while writing a novel.

“What number shows up on your call display?” he asked suddenly.

I looked. “No number. Blocked number,” I said.

“Then why did you pick up?”

“Because I was expecting a call, and answered without thinking about it.”

“So you can’t see a number,” he said, and I agreed, and suggested he trying googling the scam, and said goodbye. I thought that was it.

Then my phone rang this morning and things got interesting.

“Hello, you talked to me yesterday,” said the young man with the deep voice.

This time, he sounded as if he was calling from another planet. A distant echoing scratchy phone line. I couldn’t hear him at all well, and he kept cutting out. A beater phone, I thought. I was prepared to hang up pretty quickly, since this time I was actually making some progress on the novel and only picked up (as usual, without checking the number) in case it was my sister-in-law answering a call.

“You’re right, it’s a scam,” the guy said. “I googled and it’s a scam, and they’re making millions….”

“I can’t hear you very well,” I said. “But I heard you say you goggled.”

“This time… can you see my number?”

I couldn’t, and told him so, struggling to hear his answer. Something like “…understand why you pick up these calls.”

“Because I have lots of calls coming in from all over the world and I don’t always know what number they’re going to be calling from.”

“…can’t see the number.”

“I can hardly hear you at all, and I’m afraid I’m busy. So now you know it’s a scam and can think about it,” I said, and hung up, thinking fairly kindly of him: Someone who took a lousy job and found out it was a scam and faced qualms.

But then I thought about it some more. I didn’t write down every word of the two phone calls and most of the second one was impossible to hear. But what he asked more times that I’ve bothered writing is whether I could see his number on call display.

Because of that, I began to wonder whether he was less worried about the fact he’s working a scam than he was about the phone number being traced back to him.

On the first phone call, I’d explained the fact I knew what was going on by saying that I used to work as a journalist. Maybe he was afraid that if I had his number, I’d feature him in a story and get him in trouble, either with his bosses or with the law. He might lose his job or even face charges.

Well, I don’t have his number, have no plans to write a news story and as far as facing charges goes, I’m pretty sure Interpol isn’t busy tracking down low-level employees of Windows technical department scams.

But from the sounds of it, the guy has no intention of quitting the scam as long as he figures he can’t get caught.

Maybe he feels trapped in his six-month contract, which he feels he can’t break. Maybe he needs money desperately. I know nothing about him or his circumstances.

Only this: he seems to have qualms and seems unprepared to act on them. And I think it’s a major problem in the world today, that too many people have qualms and don’t do anything about it, even when it doesn’t cost them anything.

Just a personal opinion.

(Yay, school kids, marching against guns.)

PS. A few days after I posted, Rona Maynard sent me this link. I’ve read similar stories before but this is a particularly good one from Snidgha Poonam in The Guardian.