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The con artists, pretending to be Spark employees, spent the time having the woman perform arbitrary actions with her phone before getting on with the finale of their act.
Late at night and seven hours into the scam, they told her that her bank account had been compromised and she needed to move her money to another account, their bank account.
The money taken was destined to be used for a trip overseas to see her sons living in the UK.
The Dunedin woman shared her story with the Otago Daily Times in the hope it would prevent others from being scammed.
When her landline rang last Friday afternoon, she answered, which she ordinarily did not do, she said.
"This fellow started chatting away to me and said he was from Spark ... He told me something was wrong with my phone."
She remained on the line with the man for the next seven hours while he walked her through random phone checks.
Near the end of the conversation, the scammers told her there was a problem with her bank account and she needed to transfer her money to another bank account.
"Looking back now, it's so stupid, why would Spark be asking about my bank account? ... But would you believe it was 10pm at night before they finished talking to me."
The next day, two $2000 transactions and two $9999.99 transaction had been completed.
"They asked me to transfer $9999 and another lot of $9999. Altogether they had taken about $24,000 from me."
Once she realised what had happened, she and her family called police, contacted the bank and let Spark know people were pretending to be the company.
She said she was "thoroughly taken in," by the scam and never expected she would fall for one.
"I would never have even thought that I would have done anything so stupid.
"I was caught up in it, it was a hot day ... I just wasn't with it."
She said of her group of six elderly friends, she was the third to be scammed out of a significant amount of savings.
The next step for her would be to see if police and her bank's fraud department could help her retrieve some of the stolen money, the woman said.
On its website, Spark warns customers about scams, saying it would never call out of the blue and request a password or credit card details, threaten to disconnect a person, tell them they had been hacked or request access to their personal devices.
"Spark helps prevent people falling victim to fraudulent Spark impersonations via email by adopting a technology called BIMI or `Brand Indicators for Message Identification'.
"This shows either our trademarked logo or a blue verification tick in the sender section of some email platforms when the communications are legitimate."
Spark said victims of scams should contact their banks, change passwords and report the scam to Netsafe and the police.
