1872 Chicago Tribune 18 Oct. 8/4 A quintet of bunco thieves were tried by jury.

1875 Chicago Tribune 8 Dec. 12/3 This marriage was merely a ‘confidence’ or ‘bunko’ game on both sides.

1883 Philada. Times No. 2892. 2 Tom's method of bunko was the well-known lottery game.

1883 Standard 1 Dec. 2/4 ‘Bunko men’, and swindlers..pick up a very good living.

1888 Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago) 2 Feb. (Farmer) The recent bunco game in which William Murdoch..was robbed of 10,000 dols.

1889 J. S. Farmer Americanisms s.v. From this we get such compounds as bunco-case, bunco-game, etc.

1901 S. E. White Westerners xiii. 94 Bunco men can clean him out in a gambling joint.

1904 W. N. Harben Georgians 241 I jest axed you how much money you've turned over to this bunco shyster?

1906 Springfield Weekly Republ. 13 Dec. 1 The bunco nature of the British House of Lords is exposed..in Lord Lansdowne's speech.

1920 H. Crane Let. 24 Feb. (1965) 33 It's the old bunko stuff about ‘working from the bottom up’.

1963 Spectator 5 July 9 The bunco-artists from the lunatic fringe of the Democratic party.

1875 Chicago Tribune 1 Oct. 4/3 A ‘bunko-steerer’ seems to be a subordinate confidence-man.

1876 W. Besant & J. Rice Golden Butterfly III. xxxi. 8 ‘Perhaps..you would explain what a Banco Steerer and a Roper are.’.. ‘The Roper or the Banco Steerer, gentlemen, will strip you so clean that there won't be left the price of a four-cent paper.

1883 Philada. Times No. 2892. 2 There is not a smoother-tongued fellow in the great army of bunko-steerers.

1886 Leslie's Pop. Monthly Apr. 423/2 The victims, like those of the ‘bunco steerers’ in our cities, are usually very loath to make their grievances known.

1889 J. S. Farmer Americanisms s.v. The men who thus swindle, are termed bunco-men or bunco steerers.

1890 Congress. Rec. Mar. 2378/2 Such a man would certainly become the victim of a bunco-steerer or a confidence swindler before he got out of town.

1910 O. Johnson Varmint iv. 55 Why, there's a bunch of young Stock jobbers around here that would make a Wall Street bunco-steerer take to raising chickens.

1875 Chicago Tribune 30 Sept. 4/2 The criminal classes..proceeded to introduce the business of ‘bunko-steering’.

1889 R. Kipling From Sea to Sea (1904) I. xxiii. 481 Would you play a straight game..let me know something about bunco-steering.

1892 Daily News 1 Jan. 7/3 Obtaining a sum of money..in Albany, New York, by what at first appeared to be a variation of the confidence trick, locally known as ‘bunco-steering’.

1929 Atlantic Monthly Sept. 378/2 I'm glad we got Aggie by a bunco-steering trick.

1875 Chicago Tribune 6 July 8/1 The fugitive is the same person who bunkoed a stranger out of $75 recently.

1883 Philada. Times No. 2892. 2 A Reading banker bunkoed.

1892 Congress. Rec. Mar. 2651/2 The farmer is always buncoed by the three-card monte, green-goods protection shouter.

1895 Congress. Rec. Mar. 3215/1 If the old farmer goes to the city, and is buncoed once, I have considerable sympathy for him. If he is buncoed twice [etc.].

1910 W. M. Raine Bucky O'Connor 214 Unless I can fix up a deal with him, Mr. Reilly's wise play buncoes us and himself out of thirty thousand dollars.

1926 J. Black You can't Win xiii. 174 The way to sell a brass brick is to bunko yourself first into the belief that your brick is solid gold.

1904 E. Lefevre in Bookman Apr. 145 The great bankers became great buncoers and went into all manner of schemes during the boom.

1894 Columbus (Ohio) Disp. 28 May A noted buncoist, who attempted to turn a trick on Farmer Abel Comstock, of Wood County.