Discouraging Concealment

Director: Look, the CIA maintains a secret storage facility underneath the camp.
Cody: That's impossible. Kids have been snooping around this place for years. Somebody would've found the entrance by now.
Director: [gesturing to the "out-of-service" toilet stall] That's why we put it where no one wants to spend too much time.

— Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London

If a character has something they don't want anyone else messing with, there's many different ways they might hide it. They could explicitly claim it's not what it is, but any decently smart person will see through that. They could put it somewhere no one is likely to look, but someone could stumble upon it anyway.

Or, they might use this trope: leave it in plain sight, but dress it up as something repugnant. Chocolate hidden in a box labeled "Dried Broccoli," for example; or a button that produces free money marked "Begin Math Test," or a questionable DVD in the box for Ishtar. If you're feeling particularly unsubtle, put a sign on it telling people to pay no attention to it.

Beware the Too Dumb to Fool, for they may just search it just to be thorough, they may smash it open because they don't like what you used to conceal your valuables (or just to be mean), they decide pawnable/eatable items are pawnable and eatable all the same, or worse yet they may steal it because they actually like the disgusting item. The possibility also exists that you tried to be too clever and made the concealment so absurdly disgusting that someone will search it just for the curiosity that someone would dare keep that in their room.

Similar to Hidden in Plain Sight, but with something added to convince people to stay away (which often backfires). See also Coffin Contraband or Bodybag Trick when the discouraging element is a human corpse.

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Examples

Advertising

• A series of Chex Mix ads have random people stealing Chex Mix from a person, until a spokesman offers a decoy bag or bucket of "Boring Chips" or "Boring Popcorn".
• The " Eggo Security Program" commercial series involves disguising a box of waffles as disgusting things like "stinky sweatsock casseroles", "slimy green stuff surprise", "garbage gumbo", and "slop pops" to ward off would-be moochers.

Comic Strips

• Foxtrot: Jason writes a personal operating system called Jasondows which he codenames "Homework", citing real-life codenames such as "Memphis" and "Tempo", to prevent his family from snooping as well as an excuse to kick them off the computer.

Films — Live-Action

• Agent Cody Banks 2: Destination London: The CIA Director tells Cody that the camp for training junior agents has a secret storage facility underneath it. When Cody points out that the entrance to the facility would have been discovered years ago, the Director reveals that the entrance was behind an "out-of-service" toilet stall.
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: The Holy Grail is an ordinary, worn-down drinking goblet placed alongside an array of shiny, elaborately decorated ones. The idea is that Jesus was a working-class man and couldn't have afforded anything as grand and expensive as anything else on the shelf.
• Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Agent Stone operates a coffee shop during Dr. Robotnik’s absence from Earth. When he finds out Robotnik has returned and is on his way, he hastily rushes everyone out and closes for the night, removing his A Grade Health Inspection notice in the window to reveal an F- Grade for good measure.
• Young Tom Edison: Edison stores all his chemicals in bottles labeled "Poison" with a skull and crossbones on them; there's also a numeric code on the bottle, so only he knows which bottles contain what stuff. He does this so nobody will steal any of it. But then he accidentally (non-lethally) poisons someone with one of his concoctions and he becomes a social pariah.

Literature

• Discussed in the Agatha Christie short story "Strange Jest." Miss Marple recalls her Uncle Henry, who was something of The Gadfly, endlessly bragging about a brand-new, state-of-the-art safe he'd had installed to protect his money. When curious thieves broke in and opened the safe, they found it empty; Uncle Henry had actually concealed his fortune behind a bound collection of old sermons in his library. Miss Marple explains that Uncle Henry knew that no one would willingly take books of that kind off the shelf, making it the perfect hiding place.
• Discworld:
  • In Night Watch, Lord Vetinari hid the last two copies of a book on camouflage (which he considered dangerous but couldn't bring himself to destroy) by putting them inside a cover of "anecdotes of famous accountants".
  • Ponder Stibbons conceals advanced and potentially dangerous magics from the other senior Wizards by labelling them with prominently-displayed titles such as "Advanced Postulates in Quantum Accountancy" or "Joint Research in Multi-Dimensional Tax Accountancy With the Guild of Chartered Accountants and Usurers".
• The Great Train Robbery: The team's Safe Cracking expert is smuggled aboard the train's cargo car (where the safe with the gold is located) by placing him inside a coffin. The coffin is prevented from being searched by the police by having the team's Femme Fatale (pretending to be his widow) loudly proclaim in the station that he died of cholera.
• Harry Potter:
  • Hogwarts is enchanted to look like a dilapidated, condemned ruin to Muggles, unless they are allowed in by a wizard.
  • Portkeys are items enchanted to teleport anyone who touches them under the correct conditions, used by wizards for group travel. They're often made from innocuous items that look like old trash so that Muggles won't handle them.
  • Discussed when Harry is discouraged by the thought of having to look for a Horcrux that could be literally any object anywhere. Dumbledore notes that an egomaniac like Voldemort would never resort to that tactic to hide parts of his soul, and indeed, all his Horcruxes are items of significance.
  • St. Mungo's Hospital is hidden inside a condemned department store in London.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: The plans for the highway bypass for which Arthur Dent's house was to be demolished were "on display" in a dark cellar with no stairway in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door reading "Beware of the Leopard". Presumably, this technically satisfied the requirements to make the plans "available" to the public while actually keeping them hidden.
• In the Marcus Didius Falco novel The Silver Pigs, Falco hides one of the eponymous ingots of silver in the vat of stale urine being used to make ammonia in Lenia's laundry for safekeeping. Much later, he discovers that Sosia hid the message naming the conspirators against the emperor in the same place.

Live-Action TV

• Memorably subverted in Arrested Development. Michael finds a bag in the fridge labelled "DEAD DOVE DO NOT EAT" and opens it, apparently believing this trope to be in play. It isn't.
  Michael: I don't know what I expected.
• Broad City: Ilana has a pair of old bloodstained period jeans she wears when hiding weed in a very private place, which works doubly as a deterrent for the police to check, and making drug-sniffing dogs look like they're just reacting to her period.
• The Drew Carey Show: In "The Bachelor Party", Drew makes a video of him and his girlfriend having sex. He labels the tape as a video of a seminar he gave at work, figuring no one would want to watch that. Until his parents decided it was the perfect chance to find out what Drew's job actually involved.
• Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: In an episode on encryption, John describes two ways of making sure no one reads your email: Encrypting it, or titling it "Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Hilarious Joke From Uncle Walter".
• Ms. Marvel (2022): In the episode "Seeing Red" the Red Daggers' hideout is hidden in the back of a run-down old kitchen.
  Kamala: [looking around the kitchen] Are you gonna murder me? Because I don't wanna be the subject of a true-crime doc right now.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000: In "Mitchell", Joel escapes from the Satellite of Love on a single-seat escape pod. No one had noticed this escape pod before, despite living on the S.O.L. for years, because it was hidden in a crate labeled "Hamdingers"—a Midwestern-exclusive snack food that apparently no one likes.
  Gypsy: There's an escape pod in Dock 14?
  Mike Nelson: According to this, there's a single-occupant escape pod called the "Deus Ex Machina".
  Gypsy: How could I not see it? Darn! Stupid! Darn!
  Mike: I wouldn't blame yourself, Gypsy. Apparently it's in a box marked "Hamdingers".
  Gypsy: Well, no wonder we didn't see it. Nobody likes Hamdingers.
• NCIS: One episode had the team discover that organized criminals were conducting business using the chat on a terrible MMORPG, where the nearly-inactive servers had almost no moderation, meaning that nobody bothered to try and decipher their codes.
• Poirot: In the series 3 episode How Does Your Garden Grow?, Henry Delafontaine hides his alcohol stash by labeling the bottle "Weed Killer" to prevent anyone else from drinking it. This ends up being crucial to the climax of the case after his wife Mary is revealed to be the murderer; she takes a drink from the bottle to poison herself rather than be arrested, but is disappointed when it's revealed to be a less toxic drink.
• The Rookie: Discussed in "The Round Up", whilst executing a search warrant on a low-level career criminal suspected of a jewellery store robbery Bradford explains this guy will be a professional at hiding the loot, thus he teaches Lucy about the "DEAR" method of concealment, after walking her through the first three steps (Deception, Elusive, Access), he reveals the last step is "Repulsion" i.e. find an utterly disgusting place to stash things that people won't want to look in like the garbage or the toilet, and thus dispatches her to search a box of dirty sex toys in the perp's bedroom. After twenty minutes, he reveals he already found the jewels hidden elsewhere.
• Saturday Night Live: One of the fake advertisements the show has aired was for a car named the "Chameleon XLE", a top-of-the-line roadster that was deliberately designed to resemble a rusted-out, crappy Franken-car with a leaking transmission to discourage thieves.

Radio

• The radio show Prairie Home Companion used to have a fictional sponsor who makes the Cow Pie Key Hider, a fake lump of cow manure that you can hide your key inside.

Tabletop Games

• Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition adventure T1 The Village of Hommlet. In the library of the Church of St. Cuthbert is a valuable scroll of seven clerical spells hidden inside a book labeled "Legal Affairs in Veluna".
• Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: A spell in the Lore of Shadow can cause an object to look either worthless or precious. In the former case, it looks like a rusted, rotten, or otherwise broken-down version of itself, though its actual functionality is unchanged.

Video Games

• Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back: The warp to the Purple Gem is hidden in "Bee-Having" at the top of a set of fake Nitro crates.
• Pokémon Gold and Silver: A Team Rocket hideout is disguised as a gift shop, with a sign that says something about "just an ordinary gift shop, nothing to see here...".
• Red Alert 3: Mirage tanks self-disguise as part of the scenery or even civilian vehicles, though an observant player can usually notice things like street lamps in the middle of the road or parked cars that can't seem to stay parked in the same place.

Webcomics

• Gunnerkrigg Court: The gigantic robot complex, the entrance to which is labeled "Boring Door." This isn't much of a deterrent, of course.
• Freefall: Sam's "perimeter defense system" for his parked spaceship consists of recruitment signs for a multilevel marketing company.
  Sam: Don't laugh. It works.
  Florence: I know I wouldn't go any further.
• Moonstuck: Woona finds an escape pod inside a box of Hamdingers in a Shout-Out to Mystery Science Theater 3000.

Web Original

• Rule 65 of the Evil Overlord List suggests relabeling the main control room as "Sewage Overflow Containment" on maps.

Western Animation

• Be Cool, Scooby-Doo!: Fred has a variety of modes for the Mystery Machine, including a dilapidated mode to keep it from being stolen because, as Fred says "The best security is looking like you don't need any."
• Craig of the Creek: In "War for the Pieces", the Stump Kids are looking for pieces of Kenneth's cube in a secret comic book and manga library. Kelsey finds a textbook on dirt that doesn't belong and realizes that no kid would think of opening a boring textbook, and thus would be the perfect place to hide a piece. And sure enough, there's a puzzle piece inside it.
• Fairly Oddparents movie Abra-Catastrophe! has Crocker spying on Timmy from inside a van camouflaged as an ice cream truck. When the truck attracts too much attention from children, he changes its disguise to a spinach truck, which drives off the children… but instead attracts a crowd of sailors.
• In The Owl House episode "O Titan, Where Art Thou", Luz and Eda are raiding an Emperor's Coven warehouse to recover some objects that were stolen from the Owl House, with one of the things Eda specifically asks Luz to grab being a shoebox labeled "Eda's longest toenails". It's only at the end of the episode that we find out that what it actually contained was the log of incredibly rare palistrom wood Eda had stolen for Luz to carve a Palisman back in "Hunting Palismen".
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Lisa The Vegetarian" Apu has a secret garden on the top of the Kwik-E-Mart. The entrance is hidden in a freezer labeled "non-alcoholic beer".
  • In "Marge Be Not Proud", after Bart is caught shoplifting at Try-N-Save, store detective Don Brodka leaves a message on the Simpsons' answering machine telling them what happened, and Bart hurries home before the others get home, switching the answering machine tape with a tape of Allan Sherman's "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", hiding the actual answering machine tape in its case.

Real Life

• A certain sandwich bag has fake mold or bugs printed on the plastic, to make your sandwich look undesirable to food thieves. Also available is a bug-shaped clip for non-ziplock bags.
• This article shows a car wrap that appears like faded and rust eaten paint. The article discourages such behavior, noting that most car thieves are not joyriders and are instead looking to sell them to chop-shops.

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