On the morning of Nov. 17, Ben Adams found himself hiding beneath the retractable cover in the back of a Chevy TrailBlazer. The truck was parked in front of a warehouse in Duncanville, Texas. His friend “Sam,” the TrailBlazer’s owner, had just finished a test drive on a 1949 Chevy truck–the same truck Adams was certain had been stolen from him four months earlier.

Adams pulled out his mobile phone and dialed 911. “Please help me,” he said. “I’m at a warehouse. There are criminals all around me.”

The story of how a mild-mannered software developer from San Antonio, Texas, ended up running his own undercover sting operation against eBay fraudsters begins with a truck. And if the story has a lesson, it’s the one told on Adams’s blog: Don’t mess with Texas, especially if it involves a truck.