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See the [[Conspicuous Trenchcoat]] for this same principle applied to costumes. Contrast this with [[Crime After Crime]]. Subtrope of the [[Kansas City Shuffle]]. For the comedic version, see [[Legitimate Businessmen's Social Club]].
An occasional subversion is someone organizing a
See also [[Streisand Effect]].
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== [[Fanfic]] ==
* At the climax of the [[Dungeon Keeper Ami|battle for the High temple of Crowned Death]], Ami gets posessed by both [[Battle in the Center of the Mind|Crowned Death's Lesser Aspect]], and her [[Big Damn Heroes|sister Tiger]]. As a result, scrying no longer works on her. Furthermore, due to the high percentage of the Light-affiliated mages distracted by the battle, Ami's Lightworlder allies immeadiately suspect
* In [[XSGCOM]], the SGC are being threatened with the public figuring out what's going on behind the scenes. The truth is that Anubis has attacked Earth but they obviously can't tell the public that. So instead of trying to cover up the attack, they pull out a unique version of [[Sarcastic Confession]], ''[[Batman Gambit|posing the aliens as coverup of something else and leaking THAT out to the public in order to make the aliens appear as just another conspiracy theory]]''. And it works!
* In [[Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality]], Harry explains this is why he doesn't simply deny the crazy rumours about him which ''aren't'' true.
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* In ''[[You Only Live Twice]]'', SPECTRE could have completed their scheme if they hadn't given themselves away on ''three'' separate occasions, all but red flags to [[James Bond (film)|James Bond]] and Tiger Tanaka. The first was one where Bond finds a photo of a cargo vessel with a secret message saying the tourists who took the photo were killed, leading him to wonder what in the photo was worth killing for (of course, the photo was in a safe in a office building Bond broke into, perhaps a reasonable level of security). In the second, Bond was doing an aerial search and was about to give up when he was attacked by 4 choppers. They obviously had to have come from SPECTRE, whose base therefore had to be in the general area. Lastly Bond learns of a local woman's mysterious death in a cave, which leads to him and Kissy to investigate it, dodge the poison gas trap and find SPECTRE's base.
** In another Bond example, the scheme to steal nuclear weapons in ''[[Thunderball]]'' would have had a greater chance to succeed if a SPECTRE agent hadn't tried to off Bond while he was on leave and alerting him that something was up. Said SPECTRE agent was then killed for getting Bond's attention.
** In the first movie, ''[[Dr. No]]'', the titular doctor's assassination attempts are what convinces Bond that Dr. No and his base are behind everything.<ref>
** One more Bond example: In ''[[From Russia with Love]]'', Bond and his ally Kerim Bey determine the easiest way to steal the [[MacGuffin|Lektor device]] is to ''blow up the entire Russian Consulate'', then sneakily make the device "disappear".
* If the bad guys in ''[[L.A. Confidential]]'' just killed one guy and dumped his body somewhere, instead of trying to pass his death as a part of another, larger, crime, the various protagonists paths wouldn't have converged and the bad guys wouldn't have been caught.
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** The second book takes it all [[Up to Eleven]], with Locke running this trope back and forth between at least two different marks, at once exposing his plans and yet diverting suspicion away from himself.
* How many Doc Savage pulps started out with the villain trying to pull a preemptive strike on the Man of Bronze, getting his minions slamdunked, and Doc then becoming curious about what was going on?
* In [[Sandy Mitchell]]'s [[Ciaphas Cain]] novel ''Duty Calls'', Cain's [[Fake Ultimate Hero]] status bites him in the ass again when {{spoiler|a rogue Inquisitor}} tries to have him
* In [[Edgar Rice Burroughs]]'s ''[[John Carter of Mars|Thuvia, Maid of Mars]]'', Carthoris is framed for Thuvia's kidnapping. Not his love would have let him leave the matter alone, but it always helps, to implicate his honor.
* ''The Zero Game'', a mysterious game is set up and then all but one of the participants are killed off in suspicious ways. The worst part is that the game is really just an elaborate ruse to get an abandoned mine reopened. Which they could have gotten much more cheaply and easily just by simply asking. And not only was the mine completely unnecessary to their plans, it actually made it more difficult.
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* This is a recurring theme in (and, in fact, often the entire basic plot of) many of [[Christopher Brookmyre]]'s books, notably ''[[Country of the Blind]]'' and ''[[Boiling a Frog]]''. And ''[[Be My Enemy]].'' And ''[[Quite Ugly One]] Morning''. Essentially, the crimes that catch the protagonist's attention are almost always attempts to cover up a previous and otherwise unnoticed crime.
* In Jules Verne's ''Master of the World,'' our hero investigates a mountain that's producing odd rumblings, but is unable to climb to the top. After giving up and filing it under "unexplained," he gets a note saying, "Stay away from that mountain, or it'll go badly for you!" If Robur had just left him alone, the hero would have dropped the case.
* In ''[[The Pelican Brief]]'', the protagonist publishes writes up a
* In ''[[Sherlock Holmes|The Hound of the Baskervilles]]'', the villain steals one of an intended victim's new boots, then returns to swipe one of an older pair, while ''returning the first one'', presumably so the owner would assume he'd just misplaced it. Granted, Holmes was bound to solve the case anyway, but the fact that the boot ''not'' bearing its owner's smell was brought back again clinched his suspicion that there was a real, trained dog involved. Had the culprit stolen all four boots and returned nothing, Holmes couldn't have ruled out the possibility that one of the hotel staff had a profitable sideline stealing guests' possessions.
* Both of the Fargo Adventures by Clive Cussler written so far depend on this. The Fargos find some obscure item which is at least four steps away from in one case an artifact the villain wanted to find, and the other a secret the villain wants to conceal. So the villain sends assassins after them, letting the Fargos know that their totally innocuous discovery was important somehow. Had they just purchased the item at a fair price, or simply ignored them entirely, the villain would have succeeded.
* Lyra Silvertongue, in ''[[His Dark Materials]],'' carries out this skill with the modifiers of being [[Guile Hero|the hero]] and a [[Little Miss Badass|twelve-year-old girl.]] Her strategy, when she finds out that the cops are looking for her companion, Will, is to talk to the cops themselves, pretending that Will is her brother, to throw them off the trail. Will, who prefers to blend in and go completely unnoticed, finds this very irritating.
* [[Don Quixote]], [[Older Than Steam]], presents a parody: In his first sally, [[Daydream Believer]] in [[Chivalric Romance]] books, Alonso Quijano, [[Mad Dreamer|pretends he is an]] [[Knight Errant]] don Quixote. He tries to live the [[Medieval European Fantasy]] in [[Real Life]] Spain. He doesn’t find any [[Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons|dragon]], [[Robe and Wizard Hat|enchanter
* In the ''[[Warrior Cats]]'' novel ''Forest of Secrets'', [[Big Bad|Tigerclaw]] wants to kill [[Big Good|Bluestar]], leader of ThunderClan, so that he can take her position. To do this, he lures a large pack of rogues into ThunderClan camp, then sneaks into Bluestar's den to kill her with nobody interfering.
* In ''Uneasy Alliances'' (book #11 of [[Thieves' World]]) when one [[MacGuffin|nice trinket]] by accident fell in the local gluemaker's hands,<ref>in Sanctuary unclaimed corpses are legitimate material for glue, and if something was left on it - finders keepers</ref>
{{quote|'''Markmor''': You mean you never made the man an offer?! You mindless dungheap, where was your brain?
'''Markmor''': You were dealing with a businessman. What do you think he does? He buys and sells things, that's what he does.
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* On ''[[Gargoyles]]'' [[Dragon with an Agenda|the Weird Sisters]] actually manage to get away with this: they have Demona and Macbeth steal the [[Time Travel|Phoenix Gate]], the [[A Darker Me|Eye of Odin]], the [[Spell Book|Grimorum Arcanorum]], and [[Cyborg|Coldstone]]'s body. As Coldstone is much larger and more noticeable, and as the other three objects were only being held by the Gargoyles to keep it out of other people's hands, they only initially notice Coldstone's absence, which was [[Batman Gambit|exactly what the Weird Sisters were hoping for]].
* On ''[[Young Justice]],'' [[Humanoid Abomination|Klarion]] and his allies cast a spell that splits the world in two, with one dimension for adults and one for children and teens. While the heroes are eventually able to trace the magic to its source and stop them, they fail to notice that in the confusion, [[Archnemesis Dad|Sportsmaster]] and [[Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass|the Riddler]] {{spoiler|steal Starro's tissue sample from STAR Labs}}. Klarion's colleague [[Brain In a Jar|the Brain]] even [[
* Used in ''[[Re Boot]]'': Hexadecimal's extra security concerning The Medusa, a weapon she's developing, prompts Megabyte to steal it in hopes of gaining the power it's sure to have. The twist being that this was ''exactly'' what she wanted to happen, and he becomes the Medusa bug's first victim, while she gloats.
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* The scenes of [[Serial Killer]] Ted Bundy's crimes were suspiciously free of evidence, including doorknobs and light switches with absolutely no fingerprints on them.
* During - and even before - WWII, many nuclear physicists correctly deduced that their foreign colleagues were working on top-secret atomic bomb programs because they were no longer publishing research papers.
** Averted in the case of the science fiction story "Deadline", which featured a fairly accurate description of the atomic
{{reflist}}
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