An interesting French word I learnt yesterday is escroquerie [ɛskʁɔkʁi], which means a swindle or fraud. It comes from escroquer (to swindle). A related word is escroc (villain, baddy). It probably comes from the Italian word scroccare (to eat or live at others’ expense) [source].
Other English equivalents of escroquer include scrounge, sponge, cadge and blag. Are there others? What about in other languages?
What’s more unsettling is that that particular French root was borrowed into English as “escrow”.
In Australia (and New Zealand) we have the word “rort”, which as a noun means a scam or fraud, and as a verb means to cheat or defraud.