lurker here, first post.
Are there any problems with the idea of me buying a laptop , using an external capture card , taping over the webcam and running it on an isolated network with an external vpn ( not running on it )?
I'm totally fine with having to reinstall windows, i don't mind lacking the ability to use screenshots like vms have. Is there anything I'm missing or should I be good to go?
it’s a bit overkill just buying a laptop and doing all that stuff. Just get VMware or VirtualBox or if you’re win10 user get Hyper-V, create a vm, prepare it and make a snapshot so that you can reset it back to a clean state. It’s much cheaper and cleaner and also if you do it all on one PC you don’t need an external capture card. You can just screen record everything.
I think you should be good to go with your idea aswell but due to the lack of a snapshot function it may be that a scammer decides to syskey or mess up your computer and then you cannot just reset back everything with a click of a button. 
yeah, totally, i’ve done a lot of scambaiting with virtualbox and vmware player. tons of fun. snapshots are convinient.
However, in the interest of making it ultra-realistic ( as in device manager and system info etc ) + running better than a VM' graphics.
I'm trying to do things like running games to see their reactions and stuff
But mainly one of my ideas is to run a VM inside the laptop I buy, and have the scammer connect to the host. Then i quickly alt tab to the vm. if they're smart enough to get out of the vm i'd be there filming them being giddy thinking they're on my host and eager to syskey it.
I already have a capture card and spare money, budget isn't a concern I was just wondering if I'm missing something here.
Thanks for writing, NeeP
Most people use a VM because it is very easy to restore a backup. Just use a good computer with good CPU and enough RAM, and the VM should run as well as a regular laptop,
You could use a host computer and then restore a backup from external media, but that is overkill. But sure, you can.
But relating to this, I hope that some day, I can use a raspberry pi (very slow computer) for scambaiting.
@atomicdragon136#76267 Thanks for your input.
I totally understand that under normal circumstances using a host machine for baiting is considered overkill. I was just making sure that I wasn’t missing anything ( capture card, isolated network, etc )
Also I have a Raspberry Pi. What aspect of scambaiting are you trying to get it to assist you with?
@robinmgp#76612 Just to annoy a scammer with an extremely slow computer. It will definitely lag a lot if you run a remote desktop program on it.