Massive Multiplayer Scam

A con involving several people at once, often to epic levels.

Say the kidnapper calls: he has your wife, and he's asking for $2,000,000 in small, unmarked bills, or else she comes home in pieces. It's the worst day of your life, but you have no idea how bad it's going to get. You tell your best friend what's happened and he, ever the pillar of support, tells you to just give the kidnapper the ransom; bringing in the police might set him off. So the two of you drive to the arranged meeting point. Your friend offers to carry the ransom inside the abandoned warehouse, but then - just after he steps through the door - a police car passes through the area, sirens wailing. Your cellphone rings - "they'll never take me alive!" - and then the warehouse, the kidnapper, your best friend, and the ransom money are all consumed in the biggest explosion you've ever seen.

But losing your wife, your best friend and $2,000,000 isn't the worst of it. Six months later, after you've tried your hardest to forget the entire incident, you receive a letter in the mail. The only thing in the envelope is a photo of your wife, your best friend and a man in a police costume all enjoying themselves on a beach somewhere, with the briefcase containing the ransom money prominently displayed. The entire thing was a setup, down to the police car, and you fell for it hook, line and sinker.

You have just been the victim of a Massive Multiplayer Scam.

The Massive Multiplayer Scam is The Con taken to its logical extreme, engineering circumstances on a large scale in order to defraud the victim, enlist his unwitting cooperation in a larger scheme, teach him an important lesson, or simply make him suffer. These schemes are usually ridiculously complex, and often involve the cooperation of everyone who is not the intended victim.

Compare Kansas City Shuffle.

Not about massively-multiplayer online games that are scams; for that, see Allegedly Free Game.

Anime and Manga

 * In Yu Yu Hakusho, arranges for Yusuke to be kidnapped and has Kaito, Yanagisawa and Kido test them with their special "territory"-based abilities, in order to.
 * in Bleach similarly comes up with a plan in which three mod-souls kidnap Orihime and force Ichigo and his friends to play several games against them, like running to certain destinations, finding their way through a maze of illusions, picking out the impostor among their classmates, and saving Chad from a giant hourglass,.
 * In Naruto:
 * In a filler arc, Gennou sets paper bombs throughout all of Konoha, supposedly to detonate them to destroy the village, but it is later revealed that many of the original paper bombs were replaced with fakes in order to let Naruto and his friends have a scavenger hunt like the ones his son used to enjoy.
 * Since the start of the Killer Bee arc, there has been a long sequence of scams.
 * Killer Bee crushes Sasuke's Taka, but eventually Sasuke captures him. Turns out that Killer Bee took advantage of the battle to "take a vacation" of which his brother wouldn't approve, and what Sasuke captured was only a tentacle of Killer Bee's beast. It even fooled Madara.
 * Kirigakure and its Raikage, who is also Killer Bee's elder brother, think that he was captured by Sasuke, and orders Sasuke to be killed, and also calls for a meeting of the Five Kage to discuss about how to deal with the Akatsuki. Meanwhile, Konoha's fifth Hokage Tsunade falls into a Convenient Coma, which allows Danzo to become the acting Sixth Hokage. Danzo wastes no time to exercise his authority and orders to kill Sasuke. He also wants to use the Raikage's meeting to strengthen his own grip on the Hokage title, and uses a mind control jutsu on the mediator, contrary to the rules of the meeting.
 * Sasuke's former colleagues decide to dispose off Sasuke by themselves. Considering that the group consists of a handful chunnins led by a junior jounin, one wonders if they have enough authority to deal with a fugitive wanted by two countries.
 * Sakura tricks Kiba, Sai and Lee into working with them, and proceeds to make a fake love confession to Naruto. She then tricks them again asking their help to find Sasuke, and discards them, because she wants to kill Sasuke by herself.
 * Madara makes Sasuke and Zetsu attack the meeting, where Sasuke ends up fighting the other four Kages, because Danzo conveniently fled the scene once Sasuke appeared.
 * Madara then picks up both Sasuke and Danzo and sets up a Let's You and Him Fight, which eventually leads to Danzo's death, though not before Sasuke betrays Karin.
 * Kabuto reappears and scares the hell out of Madara using "that" technique. Madara literally sells off Sasuke to Kabuto for his "experiments" in return for Kabuto joining Madara.

Film

 * April Fools Day
 * The Game
 * The Sting
 * Confidence (spiritual remake of The Sting)
 * Anger Management
 * Big Fat Liar
 * The movie of Matchstick Men is just smaller scale than the book (although the mark has less money to take).
 * Ruthless People ends up as this.
 * Nine Queens
 * Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
 * Trading Places
 * Birthday Girl
 * House Of Games
 * Stateand Main
 * The Spanish Prisoner
 * Derailed
 * The Truman Report
 * Man on Fire. Subverted to hell and back that
 * Duplex
 * Ocean's Eleven (the remake), in which the crew accomplishes their heist by.
 * Inception
 * Wild Things - One of the layers of deceit appears to be this.

Literature

 * Matchstick Men
 * In Murder on the Orient Express,
 * American Gods.
 * James Thurber's fairy tale "The Great Quillow" involves some townspeople who pull one of these on a giant to get him to leave their village alone.

Live Action TV
""We work on an alternative revenue stream.""
 * This trope is used as the plot of multiple Burn Notice episodes. Sometimes done by both the heroes and bad guys in the same episode.
 * On Just Shoot Me, a prank Maya pulls on Elliot seems to go horribly awry, which turns out to be one massive prank on her orchestrated by Dennis.
 * Leverage is entirely about the heroes doing this to untouchable business types who've victimized the client of the week; it's also pretty common for them to turn it around, setting things up so that the one person who the target assumes is scamming them is legit (and therefore pissed when the target tries to get them arrested). They also don't charge their clients a dime: walking away with a good chunk of the target's money is how they get paid. In fact, their clients usually walk away with at least a few million in cash afterwards.

"Will: Come on, Grace, everyone knows that four Queens beats a Straight."
 * WKRP in Cincinnati does it at least twice, once to recover some nude pictures of Jennifer taken without her consent, and once to trick a visiting auditor into giving a blatantly inaccurate report on the station to Mama Carlson.
 * Every episode of Hustle. (Except the one where The Mark reforms due to amnesia, and they bring the whole thing to a halt rather than scam an honest man.)
 * The April Fools episode of The Adventures of Pete and Pete involved a massive prank wherein everyone, including the bullies, were in on a prank to destroy the dreaded dental hygiene skit the principle loved so much.
 * A Will and Grace episode where Grace cheats at cards. Will's friends accuse him of cheating, which leads to an intense confrontation. A teary-eyed Grace confesses, only to find out that the whole fight was staged.


 * Two episodes of CSI featured criminals pulling this on the cops (with variable success). In "The Finger," a man murders his mistress, then sets up a fake kidnapping to make it look like someone else did it. In "Suckers," a casino security chief arranges a fake murder...which is a cover for the theft of a priceless antique... which is a cover for a heist from the casino's vault....
 * In the latter case, while the mastermind doesn't get arrested, Grissom does.
 * A latter-season episode of M* A* S* H features B.J. betting Hawkeye that he is the greatest prankster in the 4077th's history. To prove it, he will prank every member of the main cast in the next 24 hours...with Hawkeye last. Over the next day, B.J. fells every single one of the other characters, while Hawkeye grows progressively more and more paranoid and resorts to ever-more-bizarre measures to avoid being pranked.
 * In the Veronica Mars episode "Rashard and Wallace Go to White Castle", Veronica masterminds a scam like this on a basketball manager who's trying to frame Wallace for a hit-and-run, pulled by Wallace, Jackie, and a cop Veronica knows who moonlights as a security guard.
 * Used a few times in The Rockford Files, but the most impressive occurrence was the two-part episode "Never Send a Boy King to do a Man's Job." To describe it wouldn't do it justice, but it involved an entire fake company, a large number of Egyptian-themed movie props, a faked auction of archeological finds, real race cars, the legendary curse of King Tut, and five faked deaths.
 * On Cheers Gary managed to get the whole city of Boston to trick Sam.
 * The cops on The Unusuals fall victim to two of these in a row, a fake kidnapping in "The Tape Delay" and a robbery in "The Dentist."

Music

 * The video for The Call by the Backstreet Boys involves one of these. Probably.

Professional Wrestling

 * "Mr. Perfect" Curt Hennig's eponymous "Perfect Hoax" back in 1996. For weeks, he stole Triple H's valets and caused him to lose numerous matches because of the subsequent distractions. Finally getting fed up with it, Triple H challenged the retired Hennig to a match; Hennig accepted. However, on the night of the match during an episode of RAW, Triple H ambushed Hennig backstage before the match and seemingly injured his knee, preventing him from continuing. Then-Intercontinental Champion "Wild Man" Marc Mero decided to fight Triple H in Hennig's place, putting his title on the line. In the match's climax, Triple H attempted to cheat using a steel chair, but Hennig ran in for the save and took the chair from Triple H... only to wallop Mero with the chair, allowing Triple H to pin him for the title. Afterwards, the duo revealed that the entire debacle was a plan to put the title on Triple H (and return him to a prominent stature within the company), while embarrassing Mero for stealing Sable from Triple H.
 * Mr. Perfect was a point man for another one just four years prior. He and Ric Flair orchestrated a plot to get the WWF Title back to Flair starting at Summerslam 92. Randy Savage and the Ultimate Warrior were both fan favorites, but also accused of selling out to Team Flair. Both Flair and Perfect liberally attacked both the challenger (Warrior) and the WWF Champion (Savage) during the match. Warrior won when Team Flair jumped the champion on the outside, but only by countout, meaning Savage was still the champion. Flair beat the Macho Man shortly after this to win the WWF title for the second time.
 * This happened a lot to Sting in his WCW run, often at the hands of Ric Flair and The Four Horsemen or Lex Luger. Perhaps the most famous example occurred in an angle involving our hero and Flair in 1995. Flair lost a match to Arn Anderson at Fall Brawl due to interference from Brian Pillman, and spent the next month trying to convince an extremely wary Sting to be his partner against the duo for Halloween Havoc. After weeks of vehement refusal, Flair finally got Sting to relent, but not before the latter threatened to mess up the former real good if he got screwed. Before the match, Anderson and Pillman ambushed and seemingly injured Flair, forcing Sting to face the heels by himself. However, in the middle of the match, as Sting was getting his ass kicked, Flair appeared to the roar of the crowd and took his place at Sting's corner. Sting played Ricky Morton for a long time, getting closer and closer to making the tag to Flair each time. When he finally made the tag, the arena went nuts, and Flair looked prepared to kill Arn and Pillman...and then proceeded to immediately lay out Sting, revealing that the entire incident was a set up to re-form The Four Horsemen and humiliate Sting.
 * It got so bad that in one match it was lampshaded when Sting gave his valet Elizabeth a can of mace to use in case any of the heels tried to make a move on her. Predictably, she turned around and used the mace on Sting later in the match—only it wasn't mace, it was silly string! This was the only time Sting ever managed to outsmart someone.

Video Games

 * The third game, fourth case of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney is about how a cop's sister is kidnapped by her boyfriend, asking for a ransom of an expensive diamond of their father's at a mountain river.

Web Original

 * The other unicorns do this to Charlie in Charlie the Unicorn. They take him on a huge adventure to Candy Mountain... The second one takes him on another huge adventure to return the Magical Amulet to the Banana King... . The third one (Yeah, he's that smart) takes them under the deep blue sea to help them with a... snowman...

Western Animation
"Homer: I can't believe everyone was in on it! Willie: Willie wasn't!!"
 * An episode of The Simpsons involved Bart and Homer working as con artists. Grandpa Simpson pretended to help them, but secretly lured them into a trap where they were arrested by a government agent who robbed them and turned out to be a con artist. Bart and Homer made up a story to explain the robbery, which inadvertently led to Willie being arrested, put on trial, found guilty, and given a long prison sentence. Out of desperation, Willie steals a bailiff's gun and starts shooting. When Skinner is apparently killed ), Homer finally confesses, only for everyone else to admit their deception, down to the judge revealing himself to be Grandpa in a mask and wig. It turns out the whole town was working together to teach them a lesson.

""I understand...no holding back.""
 * Another episode featured Homer and Marge being framed for murder as contestants of a Reality Show.
 * The Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends episode "I Only Have Surprise For You?"
 * SpongeBob SquarePants, the April Fools episode, played for laughs. Squidward attempts a prank on Spongebob to get back at him, and it ends up being rather... Cruel, which actually upsets Spongebob, and make Squidward look like a total jerk (which he is). This makes Squidward so guilty that he spends the rest of the episode trying to apologize to Spongebob, and when he finally does... Everyone shows up inside the pineapple house (including a now cheerful Spongebob), with a hearty "April Fools!", implying that they planned the whole thing. Squidward immediately snaps.
 * This troper likes to think that Spongebob only came up with the idea to get revenge on Squidward, who had come dangerously close to crossing the Moral Event Horizon with his so-called "prank".
 * In a somewhat troperrific episode of Batman Beyond, a surgeon specializing in cybernetic prosthetic limbs is coerced into providing some punks with weaponized cybernetic enhancements because they've kidnapped his girlfriend. Of course, the girlfriend was working with the gang all along, and the whole thing was probably her idea.

Real Life

 * 419Eater is a website that deals exclusively with getting back at those infamous Nigerian scammers that we've all gotten emails from. It leads on the scammers into thinking that they will be getting the money they asked for, often leading into ridiculous situations. They sometimes con the scammers into posing for pictures to ensure that the money will be sent; these photos are then used for banners on the website and posted in galleries. Sometimes they even manage to get money from the scammers themselves, which is then donated to charity. These scams frequently end with the untimely death of the would-be 'sucker'.
 * The pictures are often humiliating, degrading, and frankly ridiculous. One particularly Egregious example is a naked man standing on two chairs, with a laptop suspended from his sensitive bits, while holding two torches and a sign (taped to his chest) proclaiming how serious he is.
 * Another 419Eater staple is the "safari", in which the would-be scammer is convinced that due to a mix-up at the Western Union Your Money Is In Another City. Cue a wild goose chase of hundreds of miles.
 * Equally amusing would be the P-P-P-Powerbook prank, which involved an eBay scammer being shipped a binder covered in glued-on keyboard keys, and paying about 600 dollars for it to boot.