confidence trick

confidence trick (plural confidence tricks)

1. A method of cheating somebody by winning their confidence and having them hand over their money (or other valuables).
   • 2009, Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, Penguin, published 2010, page 558:

     He was telling northern Europeans that some of the devotions which most deeply satisfied them […] were nothing but clerical confidence tricks.

• con, conman, conwoman