Other forms: scams
A scam is a dishonest scheme to take somebody's money. Fall for a scam, a phone scam, scam emails.
The obvious mistakes in a scam message are often deliberate: they filter out anybody sceptical enough to be a waste of the scammer's time, so only the most likely victims reply. Urgency and secrecy are the two constant signs. Note that the word is American carnival slang of unknown origin.
1nounscamA dishonest scheme to take somebody's money.
“The email saying I'd won a prize turned out to be a scam.”
scam is a fraud.
Scam is American carnival slang from the mid twentieth century, and its origin is unknown.
Irish
cam — crooked
English, today
scam
Built from
US American carnival slang of unknown origin. Possibly from scamp (“swindler, cheater”) or Irish cam (“crooked”). Also possibly from Danish skam; if so, it would be a a doublet of shame and sham. First use appears c. 1963 in the periodical Time. The word became common use among the US drug culture when in early 1980, after Operation ABSCAM, an FBI sting operation directed at public officials, became public.
Etymology from Wiktionary, CC BY-SA