During the dark days of the IRA bombing campaign the SAS came up with a piece of lateral thinking to track down the bombers. They opened a laundry.
Like all the best plans this one was brilliantly simple: open a new laundry in Belfast and staff it with locals and a few undercover folk. Then send out colour coded special discount flyers with 'two loads for the price of one' offers. The colour coding was matched to specific streets in the city. When the loads came in everything was washed, pressed and dry cleaned as you'd expect. But every item of clothing was also passed through an analyser in the laundry's basement to check for traces of bomb-making chemicals. Before long they had multiple traces and were able to determine which part of the city was being used by the bomb makers. They then sent out more specific coupons with numbers on them to match specific addresses. Within days they were able to swoop on the addresses and make multiple arrests, siezing assembled bombs and weapons.
The Israeli Secret Service, Mossad, have a name for this kind of approach-they call it:'Embracing the Meshugganah' which means 'embrace your craziness', ie the more crazy your idea sounds the less likely the other guy will have thought of it...