That might have been this Dilbert comic:
The term cobra effect was coined by economist Horst Siebert based on an anecdotal occurrence in India during British rule. The British government, concerned about the number of venomous cobras in Delhi, offered a bounty for every dead cobra. Initially, this was a successful strategy; large numbers of snakes were killed for the reward. Eventually, however, enterprising people began to breed cobras for the income. When the government became aware of this, the reward program was scrapped. When cobra breeders set their now-worthless snakes free, the wild cobra population further increased.
(There may be some question as to whether these events actually occurred or not, but there are similar examples of documented pest-control campaigns (and others) on the Wikipedia page[0] where similar things happened).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
Yeah I've been looking into the cobra effect in the current youtube adblocking thingy... It certainly got me to use primarily adnausium which fixes the problem since ads are served, just... you know... maliciously clicked on.
There was an old thedailywtf post about how a company thought they'd incentivize fidning and fixing bugs. Suddenly every engineer had a QA buddy, and they'd make like 50 spelling errors, which QA will find, and enigneering will quickly resolve. They took down the bounty within a week.