sent email to scammer

Hi
I've been looking at caravans on ebay, caravan selecta and gumtree. I find many that are too cheap and asking you to send an email address to them and are copies of sales which took place weeks before, but for much higher prices. They use the same photos, but are listed to be in several different locations at the same time often Shropshire and Cornwall, London or Scotland.
Before i realised these were scams i replied to one of these. Since then my laptop keeps crashing and deleting programs. Could this be related to the scammer and what can i do to my laptop to stop them? Will I have to change my email address?

If you clicked on a link contained in an email sent by a scammer, it's possible your computer has contracted a virus, trojan or some such. The links would re-direct to another site or webpage instrumented by the scammer itself. I have heard stories of people having what is called a keylogger installed on their computer without the owners knowledge. I'm not suggesting that has happened in your case but it could happen. Make sure your anti-virus programme is up to date. Scan the computer using the anti virus on a regular basis. There are also good programmes available to download that check for adaware, malware and the like. Many of them are free to download for home use and can verify they work really well. If you prefer, take your machine to a local computer fix it guy shop and he should be able to clean the hard drive properly. As for changing your email address, probably a good idea? And start afresh, as they say. People tell me it's easy to delete an email address, although it may be an inconvenience for a short period? And then sign up for another. Then in future if you receive scam emails, simply do not click on any links they show you.
Hope that is of help.