Princess Leia: They let us go. It was the only reason for the ease of our escape.
Han Solo: Easy? You call that easy?
Princess Leia: They're tracking us.
Han Solo: Easy? You call that easy?
Princess Leia: They're tracking us.
— Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope
Suppose you want to find out where someone or something is located, and you know who has this information, but he or she (or it could be a group of people) is unwilling to share it. How do you get this information?
No, not torture. Nor any mind-reading technology (or magic) either. You manipulate said person or people into going there, and then secretly track and/or follow them there.
Very much a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy if the character heads back to the base to deliver a warning that the base is about to be attacked. Nice Job Breaking It, Hero indeed. Bonus points if you usher the hero with thanks for leading you there and deviously imply that he intentionally helped you, thus shattering his friends' faith and trust.
A particularly cruel Sadistic Choice variant involves implying that the secret location is about to be attacked. Either the target believes the threat and goes to warn the secret location, which leads the attackers right to it (as they didn't know beforehand), or the target doesn't believe the threat and does nothing, which runs the risk of the secret location being attacked without warning if the attacker wasn't bluffing. Either way, the target has no good option.
Of course, the villains can just as easily fall prey to this trope, at least in works involving Evil Versus Evil and/or good guys who are willing to deceive. (And especially if the Big Bad hired a bunch of fools who will undoubtedly make it all too easy to follow them back to the secret lair.)
Can be part of The Plan. See also MacGuffin Delivery Service and Revealing Cover-Up. Related to Spare a Messenger.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- El-Hazard: The Magnificent World: This is how Jinnai uncovers the location of the Forbidden Isle, which was known to only the three priestesses of Mt. Moldune. Solution: get them to show him where it was.
- To elaborate: Jinnai spread word that he and his Buggrom forces had already discovered the island's location and were en route to unseal the Demon God: Ifurita; knowing full well they couldn't take the chance of him getting to her first. Which is why he had his communication network spy on Roshtaria and report back to him regularly. When they informed him that Makoto and entourege had departed for the island "as well", to stop him, he knew they'd taken the bait. All he had to do was follow them there.
- In the anime of Golgo 13, Duke Togo is sent to kill a Double Agent in a Canadian winter. He captures a female agent guarding the man, drugs her, and strips her naked so she can't run away. She's only feigning unconsciousness, and once Togo leaves she knocks out a staff member at the hotel where they're staying and takes her clothing, including a bright red overcoat. She then runs to the agent to warn him that Togo is on the way. As they flee on a snowmobile, she realises that her red jacket makes her stand out in the snow. Togo set the whole thing up so he could pick out his target at a distance.
- This is exactly how the Blue Guardians found the Resistance's hideout in Rave Master.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann: in an early episode, when the group is having trouble finding the Beastmen's home base, they get into a skirmish with some Beastmen, but one gets away. Kamina wants to go shoot it down, but Yoko points out that if it's retreating, they can follow it back to its base. Unfortunately, it leads them into a trap instead.
Comic Books
- In the Astro City story "Mistakes", after Marella Cowper realizes an injured man at the refugee camp is a member of the Skullcrushers, she spooks him into returning to base and follows him. Later, it is revealed that Honor Guard did the same thing to Marella, deliberately leaving her employee badge active so they could follow her to the Skullcrushers.
- In the French comic Barbe-Rouge, a villain claims to have buried the title character (a pirate captain) alive with his treasure. Barbe Rouge's son Eric, the only other one to know where the treasure is, goes straight to the secret cache, with the villain following him.
- It's a favored tactic of Batman, who will often intimidate thugs and send them running back to their bosses, following them right to them to deal with them personally.
- In Captain America Vol. 6 #1, "American Dreamers, part one", Cap, Sharon, Nick Fury and Dum-Dum Dugan go to visit Jimmy Jupiter, a WW2 metahuman who's just woken from a coma he's been in since the war. Unfortunately, HYDRA are after Jupiter too, and they follow the heroes straight to him, allowing them to kidnap the old man.
- An example from Sin City: While Hartigan is in solitary, he keeps getting letters from Nancy, but she never reveals who she is. One day, Hartigan gets a chopped off finger in the mail; thinking it's Nancy's, he agrees to be framed for Roark Jr's crimes just to be let out on parole. First thing he does is go to Nancy — only to find out that Roark had been bluffing... and following him after he left prison.
- Spider-Man does this all the time, having invented small "bugs" called "Spider-Tracers" that he can launch from his webshooters onto a person or vehicle, and then track using his Spider-Sense.
Fan Works
- Done several times in A Scotsman in Egypt, when the Scots break an enemy army, they'll allow the survivors to run to their army, following them closely to destroy them just before they can regroup. A variant is to chase them to the walls of a city, where the defenders refusing to open the gates to let the survivors in (and their subsequent slaughter) does horrible things to enemy morale.
Films — Animation
- The Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame has Quasimodo and Phoebus leading Frollo's forces to the Court of Miracles due to this. Frollo says he'll attack the Gypsies' hideout at dawn, which causes Quasimodo and Phoebus to find the Court of Miracles thanks to a necklace Esmerelda gave Quasimodo earlier.
- In The Rescuers Down Under, after repeatedly trying to get the location of Marahute's nest out of Cody, McLeach lets Cody go with the misinformation that someone else has shot Marahute, and then proceeds to casually wonder aloud to Joanna what'll become of Marahute's eggs. Cody then proceeds to race off to the nest, unintentionally leading McLeach to it.
Films — Live-Action
- The opening of Commando shows several former members of Matrix's unit being murdered. The general who used to command Matrix thinks he's next on the list, so he goes to warn Matrix. Turns out the villains had no idea where Matrix was, and used the previous killings to make the general panic and lead them to him.
- Parodied in Dracula: Dead and Loving It. The heroes have Renfield released so that they may follow him to his master's lair. Fortunately, while he's smart enough to realize that his release is a trap, he isn't smart enough to throw them off his trail. He attempts a few moves... within the space of about ten square feet, before declaring that he lost them and heading straight for Dracula.
Van Helsing: Gentlemen, we are fortunate.
Seward: Why?
Van Helsing: He's an imbecile. - While not Trick and Follow Ploys, on more than one occasion in the James Bond films, the villains will inadvertently show that Bond is close to finding them simply by attacking him:
- In You Only Live Twice, the villains give Bond proof that their secret base is nearby when they try to assassinate him.
- Likewise, had the mooks in Dr. No not confirmed they were on Crab Key by firing at Bond from a search boat and later unleashing the "Dragon," they might have been able to go through with their plans.
- Also happens in GoldenEye. Bond's search for Janus' lair gets nowhere, and just as he's preparing to leave the area, the villain fires a surface-to-air missile at his plane, revealing the base's location.
- A Bounty Hunter does this with Riddick's alien-dog, shooting it with a tracker round so it will run to familiar ground, e.g. Riddick's cave lair. Turns out Riddick has anticipated this and is using the dog as a distraction so he can infiltrate their base while most of the bounty hunters are away.
- In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the bad guys specifically let old, blind servant Duncan escape so he can lead them back to the good guys' encampment.
Will: (with more pity than malice) Blind old fool led 'em straight to us.
- Star Wars: In A New Hope, Darth Vader's plan to find the Rebel base is to let the heroes escape the Death Star with token resistance, and then follow the homing beacon planted on their ship. It works perfectly. What happens afterwards, not so much. Which is strange, because Leia says that their escape was too easy and says that the Imperials are probably tracking the ship, but takes no steps to find any tracking devicenote . Though she was planning to blow up the Death Star at that point, so in a way she was inverting the trap.
- This also excuses the infamously lousy aim by stormtroopers. They were ordered to miss so that the Rebels would escape.
- The Stone Killer (1973). The police know there's a mercenary training camp out in the Mojave desert somewhere, so they release one of the mercenaries they arrested earlier (ostensibly he's bailed out by the public defender thanks to the Cowboy Cop beating him up) and follow him via helicopter. Da Chief mutters, "There goes my pension" after the Cowboy Cop talks him into it, as his superior makes it clear they'll both take the blame if it doesn't pan out.
- Batman: The Movie. While carrying the Penguin in the Batmobile, Batman has car trouble and stops. The Penguin then gasses the Caped Crusaders and escapes in the Batmobile. Batman and Robin jump up (they had earlier taken Anti-Penguin Gas pills) and Batman reveals that the whole situation had been a cunning plan to get the Penguin to escape and lead them to the United Underworld headquarters.
- Employed in Once Upon a Time in the West, where Jill tells Wobbles, a known lackey of resident thug leader Frank, to tell his boss that she "knows everything". She's deliberately vague about "everything" because, of course, she doesn't actually know the whole plan. That only comes after Wobbles runs to Frank, allowing Harmonica (and then Cheyenne) to follow him and discover his alliance with wealthy industrialist Morton.
Literature
- The Berlin Memorandum by Adam Hall and its film adaptation, The Quiller Memorandum. The neo-Nazis explain their master plan to Quiller (actually a phony plan), then release him in the hope that he'll rush back to his base to warn his superiors. When Quiller finds himself unable to break out of their surveillance, he sets off a bomb they left in his car (in case he tried to drive out, which would increase the risk of losing him), faking his death.
- The protagonist of Black Man does this as a standard tactic, letting a minor associate of the man he's hunting know he's in town, then following as they rush off to deliver a warning.
- Likewise The Executioner, wiping out a small-time criminal operation and then following a Sole Survivor to find out where the next chain in the organisation is.
- Harry Dresden once did this routine — starting with a bad cop/worse cop veering into torture, the appearance of a somewhat subtle attempt to magically follow the perp... culminating in subcontracting a muggle PI. It was completely successful, much to everyone else's disbelief.
- There's a variation in the Isaac Asimov short story Each an Explorer. A pair of astronauts visit a series of planets. Each planet has a different alien species farming the same alien plant. All of the alien farmers show very little personality and the astronauts slowly realize that the plants are in charge, mind-controlling the aliens to cultivate them. Panicked, they return to earth, not realizing they are bearing spores from the mind-controlling plants.
- In The Hobbit, Bilbo tricks Gollum into thinking that he's escaped the dark underground tunnels. Gollum goes to "chase" Bilbo, and Bilbo simply follows Gollum out of the caves.
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe: Maugrim, the captain of the White Witch's secret police, ambushes Susan and Lucy in Aslan's campus with the help of his partner Vardan. After Peter kills Maugrim, Aslan tricks Vardan into his leading his troop to the Witch's hideout to rescue Edmund.
- In the Modesty Blaise story "The Giggle-Wrecker", the villains turn out to have been attempting this, setting up a situation where they figured Sir Gerald would have no choice but to activate one of his sleeper agents and in the process reveal their identity to Soviet intelligence. Sir Gerald, without knowing of the plan but instinctively reluctant to expose his sleeper agents if another way exists, puts a spoke in the plan by giving the job to Modesty and Willie instead.
- Sherlock Holmes uses a version of the ploy in his first story, "A Scandal in Bohemia". By getting himself brought into Irene Adler's rooms in disguise and setting an apparent fire, he discovers where she hid the blackmail photo. However, she realizes what happened and gets away with the photo before he can take it.
- In the third novel of the The Milkweed Triptych, Raybould Marsh barely escapes the End of the World as We Know It by traveling back in time to World War II. Unfortunately his money and identity cards are all from 1963, so he's quickly detained by the police on suspicion of being a German spy with badly-forged documents. This turns out to be an advantage through, as the authorities release him the next day in the hope he'll lead them to other members of his cell. As Marsh is an intelligence agent, but a British one and therefore familiar with London, he's able to escape their surveillance.
Live-Action TV
- Arrested Development: In "Top Banana", Michael needs to find where George Sr. has hidden the company jet's flight records. Lucille says that the records are probably in a storage unit, but she denies knowing where the unit is. Michael later tells Lucille that auditors are coming to her penthouse to check for any luxury items bought with company money, then he follows Lucille's housekeeper when she's sent to hide Lucille's fur coats in the storage unit. Unfortunately, George Sr. already hired an arsonist to burn everything in the unit before Michael gets there.
- In one episode of the campy '60's Batman (1966) series, Batman lets the villain's Perky Female Minion go after planting a "bug" in her purse. Amazingly, in this case, the villain finds it.
- In an episode of The Closer, a killer has been using marked money stolen from a murdered FBI informant. Brenda has enough evidence to arrest him, but she wants to know where the money is being kept. So she blackmails the killer, and when he goes to his stash to get the money to pay her off the FBI follows him and seizes the money.
- Paul Ballard uses this trick in Dollhouse. After he discovers that Mellie is secretly a doll, he deliberately drives her away, then shadows her until she is picked up by her handler and brought back to the Dollhouse.
- In The Outer Limits (1995) episode "Relativity Theory", humans kill small aliens who, it turns out, were merely alien children doing a camping trip. When their parents investigate, the humans try (and fail) to destroy their navigational computer before the aliens find Earth's location. Cue a powerful, now hostile, alien ship appearing above the Earth.
- Person of Interest:
- In "Brotherhood", Shaw captures a Giant Mook whom she allows to escape in the hope he'll lead her to Dominic, the unseen leader of the Brotherhood. Instead, he leads her to a stash of heroin that she uses to bargain for the release of Reese. It's revealed at the end of the episode that the mook is Dominic. He couldn't shake off Shaw's tail, so he led her to a lesser prize instead.
- In "6,741", Samaritan lets Shaw go in order for her to lead them to the heroes' hideout. It's all virtual reality, so when she realizes she's playing into Samaritan's hands and kills herself, they just reset the simulation and try again.
- The Professionals
- In "Kickback", a Professional Killer captured by CI5 is being taken to prison, only to be freed by masked gunmen who give him the keys to a fast car and tell him to get the hell out of there. He turns up at the broker who hired him, full of praise for arranging his escape...only he knows nothing about it and CI5 are about to kick down the door to arrest the next link in the chain.
- In "Involvement", Doyle questions a junkie about the location of someone he's looking for. The junkie tries to fob him off with wrong information; Doyle pretends to believe it but tells Bodie to drive after him. When the junkie tries calling from a phone booth to warn the man they're looking for, Doyle forces his way into the booth to get the number called.
- In "Not A Very Civil Civil Servant", Bodie fights a couple of goons who've found a package of papers that implicate a Corrupt Corporate Executive. One of them grabs the package, jumps in his car and drives off past the car driven by Doyle who doesn't even try to block him off. Turns out it's All According to Plan because Cowley wants to follow the papers (which have been already been swapped for a decoy package) back to the executive as further evidence against him.
- In the '90s live-action Zorro, a poisoned Zorro tricks his poisoner into thinking that he had been subjected to the same poison so that he could follow the poisoner to the nearest source of the antidote.
- Breaking Bad: In Tohajiilee, Hank and Jesse devise one to find the location of Walt's money. First, they get a description of the container the money is stored in, and make a replica with fake money. Then, Jesse, pretending to act alone, taunts Walt with footage of him burning it. Walt, thinking Jesse found his money, drives to the site where he hid it to rescue it.
- On NCIS: Los Angeles, The Squad arrange the escape of an incarcerated terrorist figuring that he'll return to his brother's cell. A season later, he does, and they eliminate the terrorists.
- Burn Notice: Team Westen pulls this several times, including twice against mooks for human trafficking rings to get them to lead them to their cargoes.
- In an episode of Get Smart, Maxwell "Max" Smart is captured by KAOS and kept in a cell. Their plan is to get him to escape and lead them to their target. Unfortunately, all their attempts at setting up the escape are derailed by Max himself. For example, a guard is supposed to bring him food, then turn around to make it easy for Max to knock him out. But Max then takes the food and tosses it out the window, since he assumes it's poisoned (even though the guard deliberately tasted it to show him it wasn't; Max still assumes the guard is going to take the antidote afterwards). They eventually succeed during a prison transfer by deliberately leaving his car door unlocked.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: Charlie Vickers believes Sauron wounded himself offscreen during the Orodruin's eruption, to make sure that Galadriel brings him in Eregion where he could take advantage of the Elven Smiths and use their knowledge for his own ends.
Tabletop Games
- One of the favourite tactics of Dark Eldar in Warhammer 40,000 is to attack a patrol, leave a single survivor, silently follow him back to his base to launch an attack just as he thinks he is about to be saved, and slaughter the entire base. Since their scanners are superior to human ones, they could easily do without it. But being artists in causing pain, they do it all for the look on the poor guy's face.
Theater
- In Tosca, Scarpia shows Tosca a painted fan and gets her to believe her lover Cavaradossi may have another woman. As she departs, Scarpia orders his men to track her so they can find Cavaradossi and arrest him. This plan is used to set up Scarpia's real plan of extorting sex from her in exchange for Cavaradossi's life.
Toys
- BIONICLE: In the 2008 story, a Brainwashed and Crazy Matoran is captured and "overhears" the Toa planning to attack the Makuta's lair. He "escapes" and flies off to warn them. He is so focused on the praise he will get that he does not notice the Toa following him. When he tells one of them, the Makuta replied, "The Toa Nuva? You mean those Toa Nuva? The ones you led here?"
Video Games
- In Batman: Arkham Knight, Batman finds Penguin's numerous hideouts by attacking his goons, then following them when they fall back to said hideouts.
- Command & Conquer:
- In Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Soviet forces capture Albert Einstein and spread the rumor that they're about to execute him, so the Allies will rescue him and they'll follow with a hidden bug.
- In Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, when Umagon escapes, Slavik keeps Oxanna from attempting to pursue her, explaining she's bugged and will lead them right to the mutant headout.
- In Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive, in order to locate the hidden lair of the gang lord Sanches, the heroes infiltrate his outpost and steal all the horses but one from it. One of the thugs goes back to the HQ for more, with the Desperados hot on his trail.
- This is kinda what happens in the end of Dreamfall: The Longest Journey: Kian is on the mission to find and assassinate April, so it's only natural that he'd look for the rebel camp she is staying in. However, it turns out that on the way, he decided to join the rebels, so when he finally finds April, he is on her side. Unfortunately for them, Kian's superior suspected something like that and had Kian followed, so his troops also find the camp... It doesn't end well.
- Fallout:
- In the Fallout, the Vault-dweller can buy water from merchants in the Hub for Vault 13, giving you 100 more days to find the Water Chip. However, their tracks lead the Super Mutant army there faster, giving you 100 fewer days to stop them. The former is a significantly shorter time limit (150 days) than the latter (500 days in the original release, 13 years in version 1.1), so you may want to do it anyway.
- In Fallout 3, Herbert "Daring" Dashwood ends up leading the slavers he escape from to Rockopolis.
- An early quest in Fallout: New Vegas has one guy near Goodsprings who begs you to save his girlfriend from mutant Geckos. Turns out there was no girlfriend and that the geckos were keeping him from looting a camp at the top of a hill. His mistake was assuming that he could get rid of someone who's just cleared out a hillful of Geckos.
- In the backstory of Halo, the UNSC has a specific protocol designed to avert this so no alien ship can find Earth. For instance, a badly battered ship could not go to Earth for safe haven without making a number of random Slipspace jumps in other directions first to throw any pursuers off the track, and if capture and boarding by the Covenant is imminent, then they are to self-destruct, saving only the shipboard AI if at all possible. In fact, the humans never do lead the Covenant to Earth. However, the Covenant stumble upon Earth anyways while searching for something else. Because the humans had been spending the last decade or two fortifying their homeworld while the Covenant had come with a relatively minor force that expected a regular mining operation, they caught the Covenant unprepared. However, once the Covenant realized what they had found, it went badly for the humans.
- After overcoming all the temples in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, it's revealed that Ganondorf allowed Link to move around freely so that he would eventually discover Zelda's location. When the princess reveals herself to the hero, he swiftly captures her.
Ganondorf: Princess Zelda...you foolish traitor! I commend you for avoiding my pursuit for seven long years. But you let your guard down...I knew you would appear if I let this kid wander around!
- It's not the first time that Ganondorf did this, either — it's how he was able to enter the Sacred Realm in the first place and bring about the Crapsack World of the second part of the game (though the fact that the Master Sword also served as a lock on the portal to the Sacred Realm was also a factor).
- In Mass Effect 3, Shepard discovers the location of the Illusive Man's main Cerberus base because of the tracker Miranda managed to plant on Kai Leng after he attacked her.
- In Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, when Glitch brings Dr. Exavolt to the safety of the rebel base he revels himself to be evil and signals the enemy forces to his location.
Dr. Exavolt: Our plan has worked to utter perfection. Not only have I located the droid rebel command center, I am standing in the middle of it! You may initiate the invasion.
Alloy: Ahhh dammit, we've been had! - In MySims Agents, Morcubus uses the heroes — and a tracking device hidden in Dr. Gray's journal — to find the Nightmare Crown. He admits that they were doing such a good job of finding clues to its location that he decided to let them do the work.
- Played absolutely straight in The Secret of Monkey Island. To find the swordmaster, Guybrush simply needs to ask the shopkeeper to contact her, then follow him until he reaches her house.
- Happens in Soul Nomad & the World Eaters, when The Ditz isn't careful about who's following him. Except it's actually part of a villain's Evil Plan who was merely using Obfuscating Stupidity, eliminating your village, wiping out rival cultists, and drawing the village leader out of hiding all in one stroke.
- Star Wars: Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast has Desann needing the Valley of the Jedi for his plans. The only thing is, only one person alive in the entire galaxy knows where it is, Kyle Katarn, a former Jedi who cut himself off from the Force. Desann beats Kyle within an inch of his life and makes him think his Love Interest is dead so Kyle will go to the Valley to reconnect himself to the Force. It works, and Desann now has an army of Force-users at his disposal.
- High-tech variation in Watch_Dogs. Aiden tracks a hitman by locating his niece and calling her phone for information about him. After the girl feigns ignorance about her uncle's whereabouts, she hangs up, then immediately calls him to warn him about the strange caller looking for him. The uncle realizes this is happening and tells her to hang up, but by that point it's too late; Aiden has already traced her call and knows his exact location.
- A rare heroic instance happens in Persona 5. Ordering Joker of the Phantom Thieves to keep the phone going, and to record his call, Makoto Niijima approaches two goons suspected of working the yakuza drug trade and demands an audience with their boss. She gets it, with the Phantom Thieves showing up not long after, and succeeds in landing them a three million yen debt via photographed blackmail; that said, given the Phantom Thieves' supernatural method of crimefighting, the boss lands himself in jail as a result of this sting. Junya Kaneshiro recognizes exactly what happened not long after the Thieves arrive.
- Kaneshiro: Oh... I get it. You got followed, you dumb shits!
Web Animation
- In RWBY Volume 7, Cinder, wanting to find the location of the Winter Maiden, leaves a glass black queen chess piece in General Ironwood's office. This is Salem's calling card, which was used during the attack on Beacon during Volumes 2 &3. Ironwood's PTSD has linked the symbol to his feelings of fear and helplessness in the face of Salem's threat, so seeing the chess piece on his desk triggers his paranoia. He immediately sends his subordinate Winter Schnee to claim the Maiden's power. Cinder, who has been watching Winter for just this reason, is able to follow her straight to the Winter Maiden's location.
Cinder: The general is as predictable as his androids. Threaten what he has, and he'll flock to protect it.
Web Comics
- The Order of the Stick:
- Xykon and Redcloak arrange for paladin Miko Miyazaki to escape from a brief captivity in order to act as their mole in Azure City via scrying. Using this trick, they are able to determine the precise location of the Gate they are trying to capture.
- Later, Tarquin pulls this on Elan — the carpet he gave him has a tracking rune.
Western Animation
- DC Animated Universe:
- The "Wild Cards" episode of Justice League comes to mind, where Batman taunts Harley Quinn about how she's commanding the Royal Flush Gang in the field while Joker's just hanging out with Ace. Amusingly, right after clearing things up with Harley on how he really isn't cheating on her with Ace, Joker immediately blows up on her in anger because he knows perfectly well that she's lead Batman right to him.
- In Batman: The Animated Series, Batman sets up a Mook into thinking that he killed Batman through dumb luck. It turns out, by the end of the episode, that the whole thing is an Batman Gambit on Batman's part to find Rupert Thorne's current hideout. He figured, correctly, that "the crook who killed Batman" would eventually become infamous enough that Thorne would grant him an audience. A good example of how to properly do a gambit, as Batman had to go through a LOT of effort to keep this mook alive!
- The Fairly OddParents!: Cosmo stupidly leads Vicky to the radio studio in the Turners' treehouse where Timmy using a magic voice-changing microphone is impersonating a radio artist "Double T in The Morning" to convince parents to spend more time with their children during the summer, thus allowing Vicky to catch Timmy in the act and expose him using the same microphone.
- Subverted in an episode of She-Ra: Princess of Power where Hordak and She-Ra are literally trudging between realities, in that they are both lost as lost gets. Hordak snarks to that effect, saying it reminds him of his stint in the Horde Scouts — "We didn't know where we were, where we were going, of what we were supposed to do when we got there then, either!"
- Samurai Jack: Aku disguises himself as a mysterious woman to trick Jack into leading him to a jewel across the desert that could send him back in time, so as to destroy it.
- Subverted in a later episode where Aku pretends to be a hermit to trick Jack into helping him resurrect a legendary god named Cronus to kill Jack. However, it is revealed at the end of the episode that Jack knew it was Aku all along (mainly due to Aku's hermit disguise being a Paper-Thin Disguise) and only traveled with him to stop him from resurrecting Cronus.
- Star Wars Rebels: In "The Siege of Lothal", Darth Vader has a tracking device planted on a shuttle he lets the Ghost crew steal, in order to track them back to the rebel fleet.
- Done by the Foot in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) episode "The Way of Invisibility"; after capturing Raph, Hun allows him to escape, while sending some of the invisible Foottech Ninjas to follow him back to the Turtles' lair. Luckily, the rest of the heroes catch on to what's happening and meet up with Raph before he gets home.
- Space Ghost: In "Space Birds", Space Ghost is attacked by one of the tiular robot birds, and he frightens it with his energy beams in the hope that it will flee and lead him to whoever is responsible for the birds. The trick works — the bird leads him to the enemy base.
- Tangled: The Series: In "Who's Afraid of the Big, Bad Wolf?", Rapunzel discovers that Red is the werewolf that's been terrorizing Corona, and she looks through Captain Creighton's book on werewolves to find out how to undo the curse. It says to go to Janus Point and have Red recite an incantation, but once they get there, Creighton appears and reveals that she wrote that part herself to trick Rapunzel into bringing the beast right to her so she can kill it.
Real Life
- A common ploy used by the NKVD and then by other Eastern European Secret Police agencies was to pull in a suspect, give them basic interrogation, then after a short period, release them with an apology for having got the wrong person. The suspect would then be followed to see where they went and who else they spoke to, the reasoning being that any friend they spoke to would also be involved in anti-Soviet activity and the initial suspect was warning them. Quite a few arrests would then follow. A nasty variant was to "accidentally" leave the prisoner unattended and their means of leaving the detention centre open and unguarded. If the detainee took the bait, this was then taken as their having escaped from custody — not only proof of guilt, but an arrestable offense in itself.
