pull the wool over someone's eyes

To deceive, fool, or misdirect one, especially to gain an advantage. (Likely an allusion to the once-common practice of men of wearing large powdered wigs that resembled lambs' wool.) He tried pulling the wool over our eyes by hiding the profits in separate accounts, but we were quick to catch onto his scheme. Be prepared for your kids to try to pull the wool over your eyes when they're teenagers.

Deceive or hoodwink someone, as in His partner had pulled the wool over his eyes for years by keeping the best accounts for himself . This term alludes to the former custom of wearing a wig, which when slipping down can blind someone temporarily. [c. 1800]

If someone pulls the wool over your eyes, they try to deceive you, sometimes in order to get an advantage over you. I just thought he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes to get a better price. Parents who were mistreating their small children would find it difficult to pull the wool over her eyes. Note: In the past, wigs for men were sometimes called `wool' because they looked like a sheep's fleece. It was easy to pull wigs over people's eyes, either as a joke or in order to rob them.

To hoodwink or deceive someone. This term comes from—and long survives—the custom of wearing a wig (except in the British legal system, where judges and barristers still do so). One writer suggests that it alludes to the slippage of the wig of a judge, who is temporarily blinded by a clever lawyer. In any event, it was used figuratively in a quite general way from the early nineteenth century on, on both sides of the Atlantic. “He ain’t so big a fool as to have the wool drawn over his eyes in that way,” wrote Frances M. Whitcher (The Widow Bedott Papers, 1856).