I've got a car up for sale on ebay with my personal phone number in the classified ad'

I got a text earlier which came up on my android phone as a name (not a number as most unknown texts do)

"Hi, I am interested in your vehicle from ebay, please contact me at: (same name as text)@gmail.com"

Seemed odd to me so thought I would check out before e-mailing

I hit call and then cancelled it immediately so that I could see what the number was and it was a 7 digit number, not a normal phone no.

I googled the number and it fired up a twitter account of someone "Name of texter@Number it came from" some low level musician from an American city who hasn't done a twitter in over 2 years.

I'm sure its something dodgy but does anyone kinow what the scam is? Are they trying to get a name, phone number, car reg and e-mail address?

Its a pretty rare car (Alfa 155) and its not taxed or insured so don't think its somebody cloning it

Just wondering if I should be keeping an eye out for anything dodgy in particular.

You used to be able to send SMS messages from websites - if you still can then that may be how you were contacted.

Otherwise it doesn't sound quite right to me.

Currently selling a vehicle on ebay too. I've just got a similar (same?) text from 'Stanley', same text as yours. No results for his email address though.

You might find the scam comes after you make contact but the whole thing seems a bit odd.

Google brought up THIS Which sounds like it could be similar.

the number is probably premium rate. so will cost you a small fortune and the other guy makes a profit.

I had a txt from "Stanley" this afternoon about my car add on the bay.
Decided it was to dodgey to reply to.

Yep the scam will come later, will be the standard fake paypal or overpaying scam.

You can safely ignore any message relating to "your item" or "your vehicle" as it is just a web crawler lifting the details, searching for a phone number and sending an SMS via the internet as it's free and untraceable. Delete and move on.

It was Stanley who text me. I assume it's a bot trawling ebay for phone numbers. Obvious I haven't e-mailed the address it sent me.