Well as for staying safe, never give scammers any of your real information. A VPN ran on your actual computer would also be good so scammers can’t figure out your IP address I recommend PIA: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/.
As for calling them don’t use your actual phone use a service like text now or google voice which are both free to call scammers.
For filling up your VM use this site here which lets you choose some programs and it downloads and installs them all for you https://ninite.com/. Going on google chrome on your VM and just going to a ton of sites is also good so you fill up your search history since scammers tend to look at that from time to time.
Also here is a good post on helping to hide the fact your VM is a VM - How to make a VMware Virtual Machine match host system info