Coney-catching

Coney-catching is Elizabethan slang for theft through trickery. It comes from the word "coney", meaning a rabbit raised for the table and thus tame.
A coney-catcher was a thief or con man.
It was a practice in medieval and Renaissance England in which devious people on the street would try to con or cheat vulnerable or gullible pedestrians. The term appears in The [Taming of the Shrew] and The [Merry Wives of Windsor] by William Shakespeare, and in the John Florio translation of Montaigne's essay, "Of the Cannibals."
The term was first used in print by Robert Greene in a series of 1592 pamphlets, the titles of which included "The Defence of Conny-catching," in which he argued there were worse crimes to be found among "reputable" people, and "A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher."