Definition

Dupe is a verb that means to deceive or trick someone into believing something that is not true.

Pronunciation

US English

UK English


See Synonyms, Antonyms and Usage

Excerpts from News Articles

I let them freeze for nearly four hours, then scooped up the contents. The texture was like a slightly softened ice cream, a convincing dupe for the real thing. But the mouthfeel was just a little off — the ice cream didn’t offer that satisfyingly creamy melting sensation that makes the classic version the stuff that we all scream for. And there was no covering up that salty tang of cottage cheese — perhaps if I had used a touch more sweetener, it might have better balanced it out.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Washington Post

The Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) warned that scammers were using increasingly sophisticated and convincing methods to dupe potential travellers into paying for non-existent holidays and services.

Logo 2023-04-12 The Independent

In the dishonest business that is politics, perhaps nothing is as dishonest as its lifeblood: fundraising. Fundraising emails are routinely, utterly misleading. They’ll often refer to being just this close to an undeclared fundraising goal. They’ll promise a donation “match” in ways that make no sense. And increasingly, they’ll try to dupe donors into unwittingly making recurring donations instead of just one. Donald Trump’s political operation put that last one on the map.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

The Love Is Blind star also shared some snaps of her and Khloe on her own Instagram. “For all those that call me a Khloe dupe just want to say thank you for the compliment okurrr,” she wrote in the caption.

Logo 2023-04-20 The Independent

Still, under Khan, the FTC has recovered {$}60 million in lost wages for Amazon delivery drivers and returned {$}115 million in refunds to MoneyGram customers who were duped by scammers. In one of the biggest settlements in FTC history, video game maker Epic Games paid a fine of {$}520 million for reportedly tricking players to make unintended purchases and violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act.

Logo 2023-03-07 NPR

Nevertheless, it is her Nigerian experience that shapes “Benji”’s backstory of a deceitful pastor, lending the entire story a heightened satisfaction—especially in comparison to “Corrie”—when the plot twist is revealed at the end. In a place where pastors our duping people, why not those of lesser cloth?

Logo 2023-03-15 Literary Hub

They knew the Ku Klux Klan was born in the murk of blood-spilling hate, built around a racial order that would find its most ghastly expression in the laws of Nazi Germany. They would tell themselves that the vast Klan of the American Midwest was nonviolent, casually cruel at worst, that its members were hayseeds and dupes and chuckleheads, that one twisted man with a surfeit of charisma had taken over the state without the consent of the majority.

Logo 2023-04-04 Literary Hub

I remember when Trump and his stunt-addicted allies urged their dupes to invade New York to protest the unfolding “witch hunt”. A few dupes showed up and vented, on cue, their ingrained anger. But most stayed home, knowing the last time “Don” Trump wanted them to do his violent, coup d’état bidding, they ended up in the FBI’s crosshairs and the clink.

Logo 2023-04-05 Al Jazeera

At the beginning of the course, students were duped by features that are ludicrously easy to game: a site’s “look,” the presence of links to established sources, strings of scientific references or the sheer quantity of information a site provides.


Others, like Felix Lim, have been duped as scammers preying on home-seekers emerge with a new tactic. He lost S{$}6,700.

Logo 2023-04-10 Channel NewsAsia

François Hollande, the former French president has been duped by two pro-Kremlin Russian pranksters Vivan and Lexus, who posed as the former Ukrainian president, Petro Poroshenko.

Logo 2023-04-11 EURO News

A jury was told how she had duped investors with false claims that her California company’s technology could diagnose diseases with only a few drops of blood.

Logo 2023-04-11 The Independent

The study’s findings demonstrate the lack of regulation in the nation’s burgeoning cannabis industry and suggest that many buyers may be getting duped into believing their purchase will have a stronger concentration of THC, the psychoactive compound responsible for the euphoric “high” that weed delivers. Researchers say it is the first peer-reviewed study to examine empirically the potency of commercially available cannabis.

Logo 2023-04-13 The Washington Post

I do not for one moment doubt the quality of Aesop. Surely there isn’t a more emphatically made handwash. It sets the tone with a pinpoint aesthetic. But we might also be aware that, probably, we have all been a little duped . What seems like a bashful brand – it has never advertised – must be calculated, too. Because actually there is no escaping the fact that an Australian man has convinced us (and I include myself in this, absolutely) that spending £70 on a pot of hand balm is completely normal.

Logo 2023-04-14 The Spectator

Since at least August 2016, Nexway provided its foreign tech support scammer clients, including Tech Live Connect Pte Ltd, Saburi TLC, and Sensei Ventures, Inc., which collectively did business as Tech Live Connect and Premium Techie Support ... substantial assistance and surreptitious access to the United States credit card system, thus allowing the tech support scammers to charge and obtain money from duped consumers.

Logo 2023-04-18 The Register

However, The Marvels trailer made me take stock. And while I thought I was back drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, it dawned on me. The reason I got excited wasn’t the promise of finding out how the ever-expanding multiverse narrative the MCU are currently locked into will evolve, but that the sap I am had been duped .

Logo 2023-04-18 EURO News

As we await Supreme Court action on Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk's extreme abortion pill ruling, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, who helped put him on the bench, said she felt " duped " by the Donald Trump-appointed judge who may have misled the Senate to gain confirmation in 2019.

Logo 2023-04-20 MSNBC News

Yet, Spencer continues to claim there are “real cases that show how Muslim men have duped Hindu women into toxic romantic relations year after year.”

Logo 2023-04-20 The Conversation

Cambodia had recently been in the news and not for a good reason: There were cases of Malaysians being duped into going over for work and ending up a hostage. But those people were dumb — there’s no way it can happen to me, I thought.

Logo 2023-04-23 Channel NewsAsia

Selfish career-driven women. Gullible dupes of the fertility industry. Victims of the patriarchy. When leading anthropologist Marcia C Inhorn first embarked on her decade-long study of why women freeze their eggs, the popular narrative was largely one of derision.

Logo 2023-04-23 The Guardian

Searches for mascara and other makeup items also led to recommendations for products that appeared to be fake. In some cases, the items remained live on the marketplace even when they were explicitly labelled as “ dupes ”.

Logo 2023-04-23 The Guardian

Either way, the victim's PC is duped into trusting a privileged driver, granting an intruder low-level rights and access, which gives them the ability to side step any protections and deploy their malware. And to be clear, AuKill takes the BYOVD approach: it brings onto the PC a vulnerable Microsoft driver to exploit.

Logo 2023-04-24 The Register

Disinformation, the practice of blending real and fake information with the goal of duping a government or influencing public opinion, has its origins in the Soviet Union. But disinformation is no longer the exclusive domain of government intelligence agencies.


Last January, Holmes was convicted of fraud and conspiracy for duping investors about technology that she boasted would revolutionize how blood testing is performed by testing for hundreds of conditions with just a pinprick of blood.

Logo 2023-04-26 NPR

These anecdotes show how new-age fraudsters are duping gullible Nepalis.

Logo 2023-04-26 Asia News Network

From the get-go, Restoration Hardware dubbed the Cloud “the world’s most comfortable couch,” a catchphrase that quickly caught on. Like all cult-favorite products, Cloud dupes have arisen. Need proof? The #cloudcouch hashtag on Instagram has nearly 6,000 post tags featuring the real thing and lookalikes.

Logo 2023-04-26 CNN News

The pictures themselves are high quality — every picture is clearly intelligible, and AI Biden looks like real-life Biden. As these image generators become more powerful, one can imagine future campaign ads using generated images and videos that look indistinguishable from real photos and videos. That, in turn, raises questions of what – if any – regulations will there be on political advertising that dupes people into thinking that imagined scenarios are real, or that a politician has committed some kind of act that they haven’t.

Logo 2023-04-26 MSNBC News

But recent actions – such as the US Department of Commerce issuing a formal request for public comments on how to audit ML algorithms; the Federal Trade Commission threatening to punish companies that use AI to dupe citizens or allow biases in neural networks to trample their civil rights; and talk of bipartisan legislation from leading senators – suggest the tide is turning.

Logo 2023-04-27 The Register