Not sure if this should go here or in the Nerdery, but related to Real Estate so....

Had a person contact me for a home inspection quote through Yelp. Not a huge fan of that avenue of communication, but occasionally one actually becomes an inspection, so I answer these. Since Yelp doesn't ask the correct questions, I can never actually quote from the initial information. Always have to ask for more info. This guy, had listed a phone number and asked for a text, but I asked for the info through the Yelp system.

He sent back to please text him. So I did - please send me the sq footage, age and city for a quote. He replied and asked questions/described a situation that was a little "off" and kept failing to provide the information I asked for. Instead giving a weird description of his needs and asking for my service area. Having a weird feeling about it, I was vague and repeated my initial questions. I intentionally delayed responding due to the off feeling and he followed up asking for a reply.

Then finally he provided an answer and this is when it gets weird. He gave me the specs and address of a house that I inspected earlier this year. The number is not my client's number. Spoke with the Realtor, whom I work with regularly and she is as confused as I am. She did suggest that since our client left me a review on Yelp, maybe that is the connection. But even with that, I don't think you could make those connections with that limited information. Even if you could, what is the point? I would think the only way they could connect me to the house is from scheduling the inspection through the Showingtime service. Unless they are connected to the seller in some way.

Cannot figure out what the possible angle could be here. The only one that comes to mind and is rather dark, is that they are connected to the seller in some way and want to ambush me or something because they are mad I found stuff they ended up having to fix, but really, who would do that? Any ideas? Should I worry? Take some kind of steps?

I did report the guy on Yelp. Did send a reply that I was not sure what his game was, but I wasn't interested. Haven't blocked his number on the text yet, as I was a little curious if he would reply.

I don't think it's sinister, just a scam attempt. My wife was listed for tutoring services with a local ISD and you could really only find the tutor list if you went looking for it. Some scammer got her email off it probably using some sort of web scraper built for that purpose and requested tutoring for their student.

The requests were somewhat plausible, pretty detailed, but just a little "off" and they would ignore some of her questions. Eventually they got to the point where they wanted to set something up and then they presented a pretty routine scam. They wanted to over pay for the service, or pay for several months of it or something like that, then request a refund of the difference. You would refund the difference, and their original payment would bounce.

I'm sure if you continue to engage you'll get a similarly odd request for payment that will be the scam. I don't see how it is worth it to take their time to reply back and forth like that for what has to be a low percentage scam, but I guess all they need is one sucker.

It may also be some automation doing the initial emailing, which is why you get weirdness like the service address being one you already did. They are too lazy to even change the number to one house over, they don't really know how your business works, they just need the request to be plausible enough to get you to respond.

I doubt it is sinister as well. Mush easier ways to go about that.

That type of scam sounds reasonable, maybe should have played along longer to see how it unfolded.

Just really strange to me that the address given was one I had inspected. Seems unlikely, with all the recently closed homes in our area that he would randomly pick one that would be one of mine, but possible for sure. Kinda makes sense why he asked my service area before committing with house details - get my area, google a recently closed property in it, give that info, then do the scam agchino described.

He saw your yelp, used the name of someone that commented and searched the tax rolls and found an address that was associated with that name and messaged you.