I admit that the woman was not the sharpest knife in the drawer for dealing with a Nigerian used car salesman, but, it does bring up an interesting point. In a transaction, when is the money actually yours? I've been thinking about selling my car myself (also traded-in in the past) and was trying to figure out when to let the buyer drive off in my car. If I demand a Cashier's check and walk the buyer down to my bank to deposit it, I'm still not guaranteed that the transaction is completed. If the CC was a forgery, then I'm out an automobile.
Help me out! How do I handle a private automobile sale properly???
I'll tell you what we did recently, actually - we weren't selling a car, but several large appliances, through the classified ads here. Fridge, stove, and a washer/dryer set. And I told them up front that I would accept cash, check, or certified funds as payment, but that I would need a photocopy of their driver's license with the last two, and they had to be from a local bank - no checks or money orders drawn on the First National Bank of Upper Volta, or any of that kind of thing. Turned out that all three of them paid with personal checks, so while I was copying their licenses for ID purposes, I also put in a call to their banks, asking for funds verification - when I got the okay from the bank, I said "Here you go, it's all yours - need any help loading it up?" And then as soon as they were driving away and out of sight, I got in my car and drove directly over to their bank and cashed the check.
I did that for all three buyers, and never had a problem with any of them that way. Besides fraud, it avoids a lot of other potential hassles - one lady that I work with sold an air conditioner through the paper, one of those window units. And she deposited the check she was given as payment, only to find out a couple of days later that the buyer had stopped payment on the check, allegedly because the air conditioner was "broken". Turned out that it was only "broken" because when they were unloading it from their car and bringing it into the house, they dropped it and it fell down a flight of stairs.
Remember, though, this kind of fraud is still pretty rare - the odds of you encountering someone who intends to defraud you are pretty low, and with some basic common sense, you can greatly reduce the risk even further, even if you can't really eliminate it at all. If you are really and truly worried about this kind of thing - perhaps you're selling a rare and/or exotic automobile to potential collectors for a lot of money - you can always offer to place the car in escrow pending the completion of payment. That way, both you and the buyer are protected against fraud in the transaction...