I must admit, I came across this word by typing some random letters into the dictionary online at merriam-webster.com. I do this occasionally. I liken it to rolling the dice and seeing what comes up. You then take that and run with it, no matter where it goes. So this is where I first heard of:
Mulct -- to defraud especially of money.
This led me down a wide reaching and fascinating journey to know more about mulct. I can't tell you how rewarding searches like this are. You just start reading and one thing takes you to another which takes you to another.
A fine assessed as a penalty for an infraction is generally considered justifiable. Fraud, on the other hand, is wrong—it's just the sort of thing that deserves a fine. So in mulct we have a unique word, one that means both "to fine" and "to defraud." The "fine" sense came first. Mulct was borrowed from the Latin word for a fine, which is multa or mulcta. The "fine" sense is still in use, mostly in legal contexts ("the court mulcted the defendant for punitive damages"), but these days mulct is more often used for an illegal act. It has been speculated that the "defraud" use may have developed from an association with the verb milk, in its "to exploit, to coerce profit from" meaning (as in "she was milked by the lawyers for everything she had"), but that speculation has never been proven.
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