shell game
Noun
Meaning
a swindling sleight-of-hand game; victim guesses which of three things a pellet is under
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Examples
There is an increasingly pervasive sense not only of failure, but of futility. The legislative process has become a cruel shell game and the service system has become a bureaucratic maze, inefficient, incomprehensible, and inaccessible.
Kevin was a shell game in which all three cups were empty.
He likes you, too." Finn repeated. "And don't tell me to shut up." "Shut up!" -Kingdom Keepers, Shell Game.
We reward people for making money off money, and moving money around and dividing up mortgages a thousand times over, selling it to China... and it becomes this shell game.
It's a shell game... They "give" you "free" health-care, then enslave you with a tax burden so heavy you go into cardiac arrest from the load.
He and eight others said their managers had asked them to engage in a monthly shell game of briefly inserting these unavailable properties into Oyo’s listings — complete with fake photographs — to help impress investors.