Faked Kidnapping

"That poor slut kidnapped herself."

— Walter Sobchak, The Big Lebowski

People are willing to do anything for the safety of a friend or loved one. If you're the friend or loved one, you can play this to your advantage for material or emotional gain. All you have to do is "disappear," leave a ransom note, and everyone will think you're being held captive. The best part is you don't have to put yourself in actual danger to get the benefits of people going out of their way to save you.

There are quite a few reasons for doing this. Perhaps you need money, but nobody would give it to you if you just asked. Or you need the MacGuffin, but seeing as it's so valuable, no one would give it to you either except to save a member of the team. If you're The Mole, this can be used to lure the good guys into a trap as they come to rescue you. (See also the Trojan Prisoner and the Play-Along Prisoner.) Finally, some people do this for fame and attention, for the same reason some fake their death and attend the funeral to see who really cares about them.

One should choose any accomplices in the scheme very carefully, otherwise it could quickly become a real kidnapping or worse.

Compare Fake Mystery, which may involve this trope. As this trope is a Plot Twist, there are spoilers ahead in the examples.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The second episode of Case Closed has him solve the kidnapping of the daughter of a bigshot company-president which starts OUT as a Faked Kidnapping designed to make her overworked father spend more time with her (she even got the good-natured Butler to help), but turns real when an actual criminal kidnaps him from the family restaurant where she'd been waiting out the fake kidnapping. It's up to Conan to save the day!
• Great Teacher Onizuka: Onizuka and some of his students plan to do this to Miyabi to get her absent father's attention, but before they can call him someone else calls the cops and tells them they're terrorists.
• The Kindaichi Case Files plays with this trope in one case. Reika Hayami was kidnapped by a "Clown Puppet" along with her manager. Unbeknownst to her, the manager, with help from an accomplice, plotted the whole thing to make Reika break ties with a head of film production company she was currently in (thus cancelling adoption process the two of them planned). Later subverted because it was actually the accomplice's plan as a cover to kill the manager.
• Two examples happen in Mayo Chiki!.
  • In the first example, Kanade and Kureha are kidnapped at an indoor pool during episode 3. However, though Subaru is afraid of the knife the kidnapper brandishes, it turns out to be a ploy by Kanade and Subaru's father (playing the kidnapper) to help her overcome her fear of knives.
  • In the second example, Jiro is knocked out with a sleeping drug given to him in a bottle of water by Subaru. He then wakes up at a beach hotel next to Kanade, who explains to him that she couldn't bear to be apart from him, her "fiancee", and didn't want to go overseas with her parents, so she fled there. He is extremely annoyed at first at his unwilling role in this charade, but he later learns the truth behind why they were there; while Kanade's parents really did go overseas, if she went with them, it would have meant Subaru, as her butler, would have to go as well. Which would also mean she would miss visiting her mother's grave on the anniversary of her death.
• Mobile Fighter G Gundam: Maria Louise does this with the help of Domon in order for the latter to fight George de Sand. However, George later reveals he knew about that anyways.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL: Vector does this when he kidnaps Rei. In the end, it turns out that Vector was actually Rei all along and faked his own kidnapping using a clone of himself in order to trick Yuuma into falling into his trap.

Comic Books

• Batman: One storyline had Mr Freeze freeze the wife of a banker, and demand a sizeable ransom to defrost her safely. It turned out the whole thing was a scam by the couple, and the woman had actually commissioned an ice sculpture of herself for Freeze to display, and then fled the country before it all started.
• Copperhead: Martineau plays this by claiming to be taken hostage by Clay, acting as his human shield until they make it to a getaway vehicle.
• Human Target: This is the climactic twist of the OGN, Final Cut. Ronan was kidnapped by his own father Frank, who was just hoping to get ransom money from his wife to cover gambling debts — but when Chance tracks down where Ronan is being kept, the cage is empty. Somebody else learned of the plot and took him somewhere.
• Marvel Spotlight (1979): One Captain Universe story centers around the kidnapping of district attorney Edward Stanford by the masked gangster Nemesis. Except that Stanford is Nemesis and it's been staged to help him murder his sister-in-law, a private detective who's testifying against. Nemesis's gang.
• Sin City: This is part of Ava Lord's Wounded Gazelle Gambit to get Dwight to murder her husband in A Dame To Kill For. It works.
• Spider-Man: In the first arc of The Spectacular Spider-Man, Dr. Edward Lansky hired Tarantula to kidnap himself in an attempt to convince Mayor Abraham Beame not to go through with Empire State University's budget cuts. When that failed, Lansky suited up as the supervillain Lightmaster in order to assassinate the mayor.

Comic Strips

• A Mark Trail storyline had a woman supposedly held hostage by bank robbers who turned out late in the story to be part of the gang.
• Modesty Blaise: In "Milord", journalist Guido Biganzoli plans to fake his own kidnapping in order to get a big story that will get him transferred back to Italy. However, things do not go according to plan and it turns into an Accidental Kidnapping of Willie Garvin.

Fan Works

• In Shadowchasers: Ascension, popular Shock Jock Sarah Blaze does this in order to remove herself as a suspect when the villain (whom she is allied with) enacts the true Evil Plan. Ironically, it's the Tagalong Kid who notices that the whole story is off and manages to put two and two together.

Films — Animation

• In Kim Possible Movie: So the Drama, Kim's abusive boyfriend Eric stages his own kidnapping to lure her into a trap, as he's really a cold-hearted synthodrone created by Drakken.
• In Oliver & Company, the dogs take back Oliver, thinking he had been captured, when in fact he had been adopted by Lonely Rich Kid Jenny. When Fagin sees the direction in the collar, he sends a ransom note there in order to pay off Sykes. He changes his mind when Jenny arrives with her piggy bank, and simply gives Oliver back. This is followed by the all-too-real kidnapping of Jenny by Sykes.
• Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island: Simone and Lena fake a breaking and entering and kidnapping. When the gang come to rescue them, it turns out to be a trap.

Films — Live-Action

• The Big Lebowski has the Dude and his friend Walter Sobchak do a favor for Mr. Lebowski by solving the kidnapping of his young trophy wife following Mr. Lebowski being sent her faked toe and giving the apparent kidnappers a ransom bribe. Subverted in that the poor woman did not kidnap herself but went missing for a few days while her friends sent a ransom note to take advantage of her absence.
• At the end of The Big Restaurant, it turns out President Novales did it.
• Excess Baggage. Emily Hope fakes her own kidnapping to get her father's attention. She handcuffs herself and puts herself in the trunk of her car, but a criminal steals the car while she's in it and the fake kidnapping turns into a real one.
• This is the main plot synopsis of the film Horrible Bosses 2. But at first, it was supposed to be a real kidnapping since Nick, Kurt, and Dale actually did plan on using Rex as hostage to get a $500,000 ransom. Rex fell in love with the idea of extorting money, so he added another 0 to the ransom's digits.
• In Take Me, Ray runs a business where he simulates kidnapping experiences for clients. Generally, it seems he makes arrangements with the parties in question that no one knows that they've been "kidnapped" during the eight-hour experience. Then, he takes a job that lasts all weekend, and the police show up...
• Year of the Gun (1991). A left-wing sympathizer who's the son of a wealthy businessman allows himself to be kidnapped by the Red Brigades. Unfortunately after they stuff him in the trunk, he's killed by a carbon monoxide leak. So the Red Brigade pretend they executed him.

Literature

• Able Team. When Carl Lyons is captured in Guatemala, the rest of Able Team follow a lead that there's an American being held hostage. He turns out to be a Poor Little Rich Kid who arranged his own kidnapping, gets shot when he reaches for a gun, and then moans that his cheapskate father sent them instead of paying up. Able Team just walk out and leave him there, telling their informant that he won't be getting his reward money as it was the wrong man.
  "But didn't they have an American?"
  "Yeah, but they can keep him!"
• The A to Z Mysteries book "The Absent Author" revolves around the kidnapping of the eponymous mystery author. Turns out the whole thing was a hoax in order for the author to investigate how real kids solve mysteries.
• In Bitter Gold Hearts, Karl Jr.'s kidnapping looks suspiciously like this trope to Garrett when he first starts investigating it. It's a subversion: a fake kidnapping that turned real when his accomplices got scared and/or creative.
• Chocoholic Mysteries: This is the plot of the debut story "Kidnapping Clue", in which a teenage girl, one of the summer people at Warner Pier, arranges her own kidnapping by another teenager in order to get attention from her mother (who'd basically left the girl at their home in town and run off to Europe with a boyfriend for the summer).
• Double, Double, Oil and Trouble: After Davidson Wylie is released by his kidnappers, the police can't decide whether it was a faked or real kidnapping — Wylie can't answer some of the questions a kidnap victim should be able to answer about his ordeal, but on the other hand he's showing physical signs of having been kept indoors and physically inactive for a long period of time. It was a fake kidnapping, but on his way to the place he'd planned to hide while "kidnapped" Wylie got into a car accident and spent weeks in a hospital.
• The Dresden Files: In a variant from the short story "A Restoration Of Faith", some Jerkass parents hire him to find their runaway daughter, but then turn around and tell the police that he kidnapped her, thinking to stiff him on the bill and get a juicy sob-story out of the incident, rather than let anyone know their own kid can't stand them.
• There's an Ellery Queen short story where a child faked his own kidnapping to get his estranged parents back together. It worked.
• In the Nero Wolfe novel The Final Deduction, the husband in a wealthy family is kidnapped and the wife hires Wolfe to facilitate the ransom. When the husband is returned unharmed, Archie suspects that he staged his own kidnapping. Not only is this true, but the wife is his co-conspirator, for tax fraud purposes. By the time she confesses, both the husband and another confederate have been murdered.
• Nick Velvet: In "The Theft of the Family Portrait", Nick realises that the kidnapping of the diamond merchant was actually a fake, to allow the supposed 'victim' to claim the insurance, and the theft he had been hired to commit was merely a smokescreen to give the fake kidnapping an air of authenticity.
• Reuhurinteen ala-aste: One story has Ryyni pretend she's kidnapped and send a ransom note for Ötö where she demands his necklace he got for his birthday. Ötö notices that the note says "if you tell the police, you won't see me ever again" only after she's been "rescued".

Live-Action TV

• In an episode of 21 Jump Street, a grandfather fakes the kidnapping of his grandson from school in order to take him on a camping trip and that the grandfather could eventually have custody of the grandson due to how they perceive the child's parents were treating him at home.
• All My Children's Adam Chandler created a scenario in which he was stalked and threatened for weeks before ultimately being abducted, all to test the fidelity of his wife Gloria.
• Bones: One episode has a twenty-something girl fake her own kidnapping with a friend's help so that she can ransom herself and use her parents' money to move out and start a new life with her boyfriend, without having to actually get a job. In order to prove that she's been kidnapped she snips off her own toe with rusty pruning shears and winds up getting an infection. Her accomplice (a vet) gets penicillin from work to treat her, but it turns out she's allergic to penicillin and so she dies. To avoid revealing the truth, he buries her body in the park.
• Played With in an episode of Castle. A woman works with her sister to kidnap her own daughter. She considers her husband a freeloader, but fears he'd be given custody and alimony payments if they divorced; by making him appear irresponsible by losing their daughter, she assured herself of the former, while paying out the ransom (to herself) assured the courts would think she wouldn't have anything left to pay him, and if she did get caught, she couldn't be punished because letting your sister watch your child isn't illegal. Beckett points out that she still violated her husband's custodial rights by keeping his daughter from him (to say nothing of filing a false police report) so she's still very much guilty of a real kidnapping. They do note that a jury is likely to find her motives sympathetic and may choose not to convict her.
• In Criminologist Himura and Mystery Writer Arisugawa, the kidnapping of an associate professor turns out to have some complications behind it. Mainly that the victim's wife accidentally killed him before he was supposedly kidnapped. The culprit stole his body and then delighted in stringing the wife along with a fake hostage situation, tricking her into thinking that her husband had survived the blow.
• CSI:
  • An episode focused on the death of a girl who'd been unfortunately involved in the fake kidnapping of another girl. They couldn't find the live girl and were warned that she was faking in an effort to gain attention from her father, but they had to find her to be sure. She turned up dead in the trunk of a car — but the kidnapping really had been fake. The death was accidental.
  • Another episode had a man try to pass off his mistress' death as a kidnapping gone wrong.
• The F.B.I.: In "Boomerang", Terry Shelton (Jeff Bridges), with the help of three friends, fakes his own kidnapping to sock it to his rich dad Gar (Carl Betz). The friends have other ideas, and it soon becomes a real kidnapping with a ransom demand.
• Forever Knight. In the episode "Dying to Know You", a Corrupt Corporate Executive arranges for his wife and daughter to be kidnapped; ostensibly for ransom but actually so they can be murdered. The wife is killed, but For the Evulz the criminals let the daughter live and tell her all about her father's involvement, then leave to her father the task of killing her. Fortunately Nick turns up Just in Time.
• Fringe: The episode "Of Human Action" features two men with Mind Control abilities who kidnapped a teenager named Tyler Carson. Except, no. Tyler is the one with the abilities and the men are the hostages. He forced them to seemingly kidnap him as part of his plan to reunite with his long-lost mother.
• In the Jonathan Creek episode "Angel Hair", a woman dating a married man seemingly drops a videotape of her being kidnapped, when she obviously hasn't been, apparently having intended to stage her kidnapping later. Except it was a fake fake kidnapping; the man's housekeeper had hooked the TV up to a live feed of the victim in a van in genuine distress, "found" the tape, and then recorded the feed while supposedly watching the tape. Unfortunately, the kidnappers got a bit carried away, leading to a continuity error when they cut off all her hair, thereby creating a mystery that led to the husband getting Jonathan involved.
• An episode of Kojak had a variation: The kidnapping was real but a friend of the parents' offered to pay up the ransom: It was actually a ploy by him to pay off a debt to the mob without being suspected. Things go sour when the girl sees the face of one of the goons, who then decides to kill her.
• In the Law & Order episode "Snatched", the son of one of Adam Schiff's friends cooks up a faked kidnapping with a couple of other people in order to bilk $4 million out of his father. It turns out that he chose his accomplices poorly, as they try to kill him in order to not split the money three ways.
  • In Law & Order: Criminal Intent, a blogger fakes her own kidnapping for money and attention.
  • A more sympathetic variation occurs in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. A young boy is abducted and has never been found, so a friend of the boy's older brother agrees to pretend to be kidnapped and raped as leverage to force the police to take another look at the case. They do accomplish their objective and SVU manages to find the kidnapped boy, but the implication is that everyone involved is going to be in quite a bit of legal trouble in the days to come.
• An episode of Lucifer has a pickup artist coach admit to Chloe and Lucifer that the love of his life has been kidnapped for ransom. Lucifer decides to deliver the ransom, except it turns out that the girlfriend and her brother set it all up for money and to get payback for the coach taking the girl's virginity and never calling back.
• Midsomer Murders: In "Faithful unto Death", Hollingsworth is sent photographs of Simone bound to a chair and looking bruised and battered, along with ransom demands (and the usual exhortation not to contact the police). Simone is actually the mastermind of the scheme, and is using it to extract cash from her husband before he is murdered.
• In the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Gets Hypnotized," actress Sally Larkin, going through a bitter divorce, decides to kill her husband for his money, . To do so, she goes to a jewelry store to try selling some jewelry. Before she leaves, she stops and pretends to look out the window, petrified, as if she saw her husband. Covering her head with her purse, she runs back to her sports car in the rain. There, she plants evidence, like a fingernail and a piece of her coat, to make it look like she was abducted and dragged away. Sally then screams, activates the panic alarm on her car, and runs off before the store proprietors can get outside. After escaping, Sally goes to a remote cabin in the woods, and sets up evidence to make it look like her husband held her hostage: she sits on a mattress and shackles her own knees to the cabin's floorboards for most of the time to make it look like she was restrained, and she also starves herself (though keeping hydrated with water). Three days later, Sally sneaks back into her own house with a rug from the cabin. She waits for her husband to come home, and when he does, she bludgeons him with a floorboard, rolls his body up in the rug, then takes the body and rug back to the cabin in one of her husband's cars. After setting the final touches, she "reappears" by rushing out onto the road and stopping a passing car. Monk, though hypnotized, still finds evidence to prove it: while Sally was hiding in the cabin, Monk, Stottlemeyer, Natalie, and Disher had gone to her house and questioned her husband. Randy passed out pieces of his homemade Disher Mint chewing gum to the others, supposed to taste like diet blueberry. But Stottlemeyer had difficulty chewing his piece and ended up spitting it out, and it landed on top of a floor vent. When Sally came back to kill her husband, she accidentally stepped the heel of her shoe in Stottlemeyer's piece of gum while wrapping the body up in the rug.
• Murder, She Wrote: In "The Skinny According to Nick Cullhane", the Victim of the Week is murdered because he has written a manuscript blowing the whistle on a fake kidnapping scam.
• In the NCIS episode "Defiance", a foreign-exchange girl fakes her own kidnapping to try to prevent her politically powerful father from signing a treaty with America. It becomes a real situation when one of her "kidnappers" kills the other one and holds her for ransom. And after she's rescued, she goes home scot-free because of "diplomatic immunity".
• An episode of Nestor Burma had a fake kidnapping become real.
• The pilot episode of Psych had this as the solution of Shawn's first case. The rich kid ran away and sent his own ransom notice, the dad found out, accidentally killed him in an argument, killed the kid's friend for witnessing it, and made it look like a murder/suicide.
• Shakespeare & Hathaway - Private Investigators: In "Ill Met by Moonlight", the daughter of a local aristocrat disappears (along with a priceless heirloom necklace). Although Frank and Lou initially treat this a runaway case, the girl's bloody hoodie turns up accompanied by a ransom note demanding 50,000 pounds; leaving Frank and Lou wondering if this is a genuine kidnapping or a fake. It's a fake. The girl is attempting to raise cash so she can run away and join her real father.
• Mathnet (a segment on Square One TV parodying Dragnet): An aging diva fakes a kidnapping by an up and coming ingenue in order to revive her career. Unfortunately for the diva, the ingenue (named Eve) happens to be a friend of Kate Monday of the Mathnet squad.
• The Tracker (2001) episode "Trust". Cole gets caught up in what appears to be the kidnapping of a rich girl. The first time, the money didn't make it to the 'kidnappers' because the fugitives landed on Earth and one of the bodies that was taken was Darius, the con man delivering the money. Nestov didn't know what to do so he went to Cole. Cole and Mel attempt to locate the girl, but they eventually discover she faked it because she was ticked her dad cut off her money supply. She ends up getting stuffed in the trunk by Cole so she can be turned in.
• There is an episode of Yeralash, where a boy calls his little sister at home, and says (changing his voice), that the boy was kidnapped by a band. The girl, after inquiring whether he's hidden and tied up securely, asks that they don't release him until she eats all of the cake their grandma baked. The boy replies "your brother managed to escape after all, the rogue", and runs home to get his share.

Video Games

• Played straight at least once in Final Fantasy XII. The process isn't fake, but being that it's an arranged kidnapping (Ashe paying Balthier to "kidnap" her when Ondore refuses to allow her to leave Bhujerba), it qualifies.
• Discussed in Hidden City when Sophia Haze disappears, causing a public uproar. Mr. Black mentions that the Jazz singer had "disappeared" to gain attention before, but she had never missed a concert as she did recently, which indicates that she's in real trouble this time.
• In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, Master Xehanort pretends to have been captured by Braig (also known as Xigbar^*and the current incarnation of Luxu, who's Keyblade is currently in Xehanort's possession) to lure Terra into using his Darkness. While it ends in success, this unfortunately results in Braig losing his right eye, forcing him to wear an eyepatch. Braig does not take this well, as Xehanort promised he wouldn't get hurt.
• The Phantasy Star II text adventure for Eusis is based around this.
• The plot of The Quiet Man primarily hinges around trying to rescue Lala — a singer, a friend to Dane, and girlfriend to Taye, the leader of the powerful gang SOL33 — after she gets kidnapped by a cloaked man with a bird mask, who turns out to be Robert, a private detective and Dane's father. As part of the "Answered" New Game Plus mode, it's revealed that Lala sought out Robert to "kidnap" her so she could escape Taye, his gang, and the life they implicitly trap her in. Robert agreed to it and incorporated it into a complicated revenge plot against Taye and SOL33, setting up the events of the game.
• In Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, Luna uses his cute appearance and an entire army at his command to fake a kidnapping so that he can lure Ratchet into his trap. Ratchet falls for it, but gets payback by destroying the Luna puppet.
• At the beginning of Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Penelope disappears around the same time the Thievius Raccoonus starts erasing itself, and Bentley recons she was kidnapped for her knowledge of time travel. The truth is, Penelope faked her kidnapping because she hates Sly and Murray, and is trying to erase the former from history. Along with her desire to profit from Bentley's skills and conquer everything.

Visual Novels

• Ace Attorney:
  • Used in case 4 of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations. Dahlia Hawthorne, Valerie Hawthorne, and Dahlia's boyfriend did this to ransom a $2 million diamond.
  • Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth: Lance Armano did this to cover his debt to a loan company.
  • Gyakuten Kenji 2: Twelve years prior, Di-Jun Huang's body double collaborated with Blaise Debeste and Patricia Roland to stage his own kidnapping and ransom as a cover-up for his being witnessed at Patricia's orphanage, where they had just had the real Di-Jun Huang assassinated.

Web Animation

• Refreshing Stories: Mariko and her affair partner Kenji decided to fake her kidnapping to get money out of her husband Hiroshi. It backfired because Hiroshi didn't care and he instead exposed their plan on live TV.

Web Comics

• In this Guest Strip for Dinosaur Comics, T-Rex appears to be missing. Utahraptor says, "If you're pretending to be kidnapped again to get attention, it's not working!" After a few silent panels, T-Rex peeks out from behind a tree, thinking to himself, "It's working!"

Western Animation

• In American Dad! episode "Frannie 911" Francine pretends to kidnap Roger in an attempt to prove Stan cares about him. She is put through hell due to Roger's usual Jerkass antics and Stan doesn't seem to care, instead making extraordinary demands. Eventually, he reveals that he knew it was fake all along (they have caller ID and she was calling from her cell phone) and after everything she's been through, she fully understands why Stan loathes the little bastard so much.
• In the Batman Beyond episode "April Moon", an expert in cybernetic prostheses is forced to provide weaponized upgrades to a gang who is holding his wife hostage. It turns out that she is willingly cooperating with the gang and having an affair with the gang's leader. After the doctor learns this, the gang leader (who doesn't know that he knows) comes in for more augmentation.
• Doug has an in-universe example in the episode "Doug and Patti P.I.". Doug is reading a Whiz Kids book where the title characters' father has been mysteriously kidnapped; the solution turns out to be that he "kidnapped" himself, hiding away to test his children's sleuthing prowess.
• In one episode of Gargoyles, David Xanatos' clone of Goliath, Thailog, is apparently kidnapped by Servarius and ransomed for 20 million dollars. When Xanatos confronts Servarius, he explains that he had received orders from Xantaos' office, which he went along with as he thought it was part of a scheme Xanatos was pulling. Turns out that Thailog had orchestrated his own kidnapping, in order to get the twenty million while luring Xanatos, Servarius, and Goliath into a trap. As Xantaos noted, he turned out to be a chip off the old block.
• A variation appears in the Kim Possible episode "The Big Job". While Shego is mentoring Senor Senior Junior, they discover that several millionaires are playing poker with Senor Senior Senior, and decide to "hold them" for ransom.
• In the She-Ra and the Princesses of Power episode "Boys' Night Out", Seahawk tries to do this to himself, Bow, and Swift Wind, in order to cheer up his girlfriend (whose kingdom had been conquered by the Horde in the previous episode) and the other princesses under the logic that they "love rescuing people." He soon realizes that the people who are kidnapping them aren't the friends he hired to do the job, but instead some pirates he has a bad history with.
  Seahawk: (singing) Hey, Bill, did you get taller? And... when did you get that scar? You, uh, didn't have a scar. (stops singing) ...This might not be Bill.
• The Owl House: In "Follies at The Coven Day Parade", not only does Luz do this to Kikimora, but apparently she got the idea from the In-Universe book series The Good Witch Azura.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Burns Baby Burns", Mr. Burns' grown-up son appears but proves to be a disappointment to his father, so he recruits Homer to fake his own kidnapping.
    Mr. Burns (Sr.): I should've known you were the only one stupid enough to kidnap you!
  • Bart fakes his kidnapping in order to cover up that he had sneaked out of the house to go to a rap concert.

Real Life

• The Other Wiki has a list of people who have done this for various reasons.
• In some traditions, this may actually be part of a wedding ceremony, or even what constitutes the wedding/marriage entirely. Usually, the groomsmen or the soon-to-be-in-laws will "kidnap" the bride with her and her family's knowledge.
• Joe Bonanno, boss of the Bonanno crime family from 1931 to 1968, allegedly pulled off this in late 1964 by hiding from rival bosses after they got wind of his Klingon Promotion plot to become the mob's overlord. Simultaneously, he was facing a federal grand jury subpoena regarding his involvement in labor racketeering. While Bonanno claimed that he was held captive by Buffalo mob boss Steve Magaddino^note who also happened to be Bonanno's cousin in a later interview, this was contradicted by taped convos between mobsters in other families, who were taken by surprise when Bonanno disappeared. Given that Bonanno suddenly resurfaced and surrendered to authorities in May 1966, it is very likely that between October 1964 and May 1966, he was living in different safehouses with loyal henchmen and decided to reappear when the time was right.
• It's actually possible to pay people to kidnap you as part of a service (usually as part of a fetish and/or finding the idea of being rescued by your boyfriend (or girlfriend, for that matter) to be romantic.) It's usually legal as long no one gets put in any real danger and the "abductee" doesn't report themselves missing (as that would be falsely reporting a crime.)

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