Bluffing the Eavesdropper in Literature.
- Used in The 39 Clues series, more than once to throw the other Cahills of the track.
- Animorphs:
- During the "David" arc in the series, once the team realizes how unstable and dangerous David is, they sometimes do this while discussing their plans, in case he is eavesdropping on them in morph.
- They host a similar fake conversation when some Andalite assassins (claiming to be there solely to kill Visser Three) show up and the Animorphs are pretty sure that the assassins are not what they claim to be. The Animorphs pretend to break up when they strongly suspect Estrid and Arbat are listening in, allowing Ax to join with the assassins and figure out what their real plan is.
- In the Arabian Nights story "The Prince and the Tortoise", the youngest prince's tortoise wife and her soon-to-be sisters-in-law have to prepare meals for the sultan at their wedding feast. One of the sisters-in-law is not very good at cooking, so after hearing the youngest prince boast that his wife is a Supreme Chef, she hides behind a tapestry in the tortoise's room to learn her secret. The tortoise notices her and exclaims, "Oh, I hope I have enough rat and pigeon droppings for my dish at the wedding!" At the wedding feast, the sister-in-law's dish is a disgusting mess of droppings while the tortoise's dish is delicious (and dropping-free).
- Artemis Fowl: Opal Koboi has her none-too-bright henchmen the Brill brothers convinced to the point of paranoia that she can read minds, simply by turning on them at random and shrieking "I heard that!". Mervall Brill at one point tests her by thinking treasonous thoughts at her as loudly as possible.Merv [thinking]: Holly Short is prettier than you.
Opal Koboi: Mervall?
Merv: Yes, Mistress Koboi?
Opal Koboi: Don't stare at me like that. It's bad for my skin. - Invoked in Conan And The Manhunters. Some priests pay a couple of guards to stand outside a prison window and discuss how the city's treasure is going to be stored in the basement of their new temple. Conan, a robber chief this round, is in that cell and manages to escape. The priests needed magic present to begin the awakening, and there was no way Conan's band could move all the cash without a wizard's help. Complications ensue.
- Penn & Teller's book Cruel Tricks For Dear Friends includes a sample letter to put on your laptop and pull up when a nosy neighbor reads over your shoulder. It makes it look like you're writing a letter about how you just got out of prison for killing someone who annoyed you by reading over your shoulder, and how you wouldn't hesitate to do it again.
- In Defending Elysium by Brandon Sanderson, one of the protagonists (Jason) is being spied upon by the other (Coln), including taping into his conversations with Lanna. Jason and Lanna deal with this by speaking in code, switching to another channel (giving the eavesdropper a prerecorded conversation on irrelevant things) and finally let the guy know they're on to him and just cut him off.
- In the Discworld books, Vetinari sends all his semaphore communiques using codes that are "fiendishly difficult" but not unbreakable. He wants people to read them so that he knows what they think he thinks they're thinking.
- In Doom: Hell on Earth, Fly and the squad meet some infiltrators posing as drug dealers and making zombie serum. The spies blast obnoxiously loud music and everybody talks about bands and drugs while holding the real discussion on notepads.
- In The Dresden Files book Cold Days, Harry knows Lara has placed bugs in Thomas' apartment. So when he calls up a contact, he speaks with a representative of the contact, warns them the line is bugged, and uses big words like "operative". Harry knows this will get her attention and send her to keep track of whomever Harry has contacted. The bluff comes when Harry reveals he wants Lara to try and track Odin as he will spot them and this will tell him how the White Court does its surveillance now. This information is payment to him for agreeing to meet Harry at all. Harry then blows out every electronic device in Thomas' apartment, which really should have been a tip-off, but was awesome nonetheless.
- Deconstructed in Skin Game with the possibility that Anduriel is listening and watching at any time. Harry has to do a book-long, solo version of this, which strains his interactions with his friends since he isn't telling them anything.
- In one of the Foreigner (1994) novels, protagonist Bren is in a situation where, to communicate with the alien atevi, he must use the communications systems of a group of humans who are not only eavesdropping on him, but blocking the transmission of anything they don't like. To get around this he sends a message comparing his situation to a scenario in a particular genre of atevi popular culture, a comparison which seems innocuous to the human eavesdroppers but which clearly explains exactly how much trouble he's in to any atevi.
- The Hunger Games: During the Dark Days, the Capitol created a species of genetically engineered birds called jabberjays to spy on the rebels, listen to their conversations, and repeat them to the Capitol's command centers. When the rebels found out, they staged fake conversations for the jabberjays to take back to the Capitol, which led to the program being shut down and the birds being abandoned to die off in the wild.
- Kea's Flight: When Kea and Draz are communicating through chess, they make sure to have some vocal conversation and make a few meaningless moves so no one will get suspicious.
- The Law of Innocence: In one scene Mickey decides to test whether or not the guards are listening to his prison phone calls, by having a fake conversation with Jennifer about fleeing to Baja. When the prosecutor brings this up in court, Mickey nails her.
- In Christopher Anvil's short story The Plateau, the invading aliens have no concept of fiction. Aware that they will probably be eavesdropped on in their cell, two captured earthmen have a conversation that plants the idea that The Warlord is real. This leads to a snowball effect, as they are already under the impression that Shurlok is real.
- Taken to Logical Extreme in "A Private Eye", short SF story, as it takes place in the future where your entire life is being constantly taped.
- In John Grisham's The Rainmaker, Rudy Baylor discovers that the attorneys for the insurance company he's suing have tapped his phone. He considers exposing them, but he realizes he'll never prove they were the ones who did it. Instead, he leaves the tap in place and tricks them into thinking he's directly contacting one of the prospective jurors, making them look like fools in the courtroom and rigging the jury in his favor.
- Used in the third Sammy Keyes book by Sammy and her friend Marissa, who are catcher and pitcher, respectively, of one of their school's softball teams. They're eating lunch before a big game when Sammy notices a member of the rival team lurking nearby, so she and Marissa start loudly going over what signals Marissa's going to use for each of her pitches—the wrong signals, of course.
- In The Secret Life of Kitty Granger, Kitty returns to her room at the manor and immediately notices that her things aren't quite where she left them. Thinking the room might be bugged, she tells Verity, "I think I left my handbag at church. Will you walk me down to look for it?" so the two of them can get outside for a private conversation.
- The Tommy and Tuppence book The Secret Adversary uses this with the character of Annette. Annette is actually Jane Finn, pretending to have trauma-induced amnesia so she can't be forced to reveal the location of a set of secret documents. Part of her ruse is "forgetting" how to speak English and only using French; at one point, she realizes she's being spied on and starts crying and wailing in French so her kidnappers are convinced the amnesia is real.
- In Wraith Squadron Kell decoys the Implacable away from Folor base long enough for all the transports to evacuate by having a group of pilots pretend to be the Millennium Falcon and their escort trying to sneak away from the battlefield using an encryption he knows the enemy can decode. The Imperials, hoping to catch Han Solo and Princess Leia, divert their attack, buying time for the New Republic to complete the evacuation.
