An online sale of an iPhone turned into a nightmare for a Kitchener man.

After posting the ad on Kijiji on Sunday, an interested buyer contacted Robert Groothuis early Monday morning, saying they were in his neighbourhood and wanted to see the phone.

The meeting was eventually rescheduled for closer to 12:30 p.m., when thee people showed up in a dark grey or black SUV, possibly a Saturn Vue, with a BMX bike stored in the back.

After some back-and-forth, Groothuis handed over the phone at the prospective buyer’s request.

“He said ‘I just want to make sure everything works’ so I handed him the phone again,” Groothuis tells CTV News.

“He looked over at the girl and I just had a bad feeling, I knew he was going to take off. I lunged in to grab the phone. She took off down the street, doing probably 50 or 60 kilometres an hour while I’m holding on with my arms.

“I was pretty sure that if I let go or if I fell off that car, I was going to die. We were going really fast.”

As the vehicle continued down the street, Groothuis said he didn’t care about the phone and just wanted to get away from the car safely – pleas which eventually convinced the driver to lower the car’s speed.

“I let go of the car and rolled once it was at a half-decent speed,” he says.

Groothuis was only wearing socks at the time, and the dragging of his feet down the road caused significant scrapes and bruises.

He also received scrapes on his elbow and face, bruises to his knee and a black eye.

“I think I got out pretty lucky compared to what it could have been,” he says.

Groothuis, who has a cellphone repair business, says he uses Kijiji regularly and has never encountered a similar situation.

“It hasn’t really jaded me on Kijiji (but) I’ll be a little more careful with any dealings that I do,” he says.

Groothuis says he believes the same suspects are responsible for a similar incident that also took place Monday in which the owner of a cellphone store in Cambridge had the same thing happen to him.

Two of the suspects are described as a young man with a thin build and blonde hair, and a young female with long, dark black hair.

They were last seen heading down Upper Canada Drive in the direction of Pioneer Drive in the SUV.

Anyone with information is asked to contact police at 519-653-7700 ext. 2233.

Police say people should use cautious when completing transactions with people they do not know.