Whether it’s conmen who pose as utility workers to gain access to your home, or the estate agent who instructs you to pay your rental deposit into his wife’s bank account because “it’s what the landlord wants”, sooner or later in Italy you’re going to find yourself the target of a truffa: that is, a scam.

As pleasing as it sounds to the ear and as trippingly as it rolls off the tongue, a truffa (‘TRRROOFF-ah’ – hear it pronounced here) in fact represents a menace, something to be cannily sidestepped.

È stata tutta una gigantesca truffa.
It was all a giant scam.

Conosco tutte le truffe da manuale.
I know all the grifts in the book.

Truffa is easily transformed into a verb in truffare. Like the English equivalents ‘to cheat’, ‘to scam’ or ‘to swindle’, it’s a transitive verb, needing a sentence object to receive the action: you can truffare someone or (if you’re unlucky) be truffato by someone else.

Quel imbroglione mi ha truffato migliaia di euro.
That crook swindled me out of thousands of euros.

Finally, a fraudster is a truffatore, or if a woman, a truffatrice.

Lei è una delle più grandi truffatrici di tutti i tempi.
She’s one of the greatest con artists of all time.

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