Morfin Gaunt got sent to Azkaban for Muggle baiting in the 1940s. A relatively minor jinx.

Confunding Muggles to pass through the Muggle
World seamlessly is like Obliviation - it enforces and protects secrecy. Completely different to baiting or exploiting.

 

I wouldn't say confounding is completely different from exploiting, or at least that you couldn't use confounding to exploit.

"I already paid for this, can't you remember?"

Basically there's plenty of ways to make your life extremely comfortable in the muggle world using magic, and honestly that's what I imagine most muggleborn would do. Magical healthcare is pretty much the only real benefit of staying integrated to the magical world, and even that seems to be mostly useful after you fuck things up yourself; a smart and careful wizard should never have to go to St. Mungo's. Contrast that to living a comfortable life without being told you are basically subhuman because of who your parents are.

On the other hand, it would kind of suit the general wibe of asshole wizards to get all muggleborn into some kind of muggle criminal watchlist just so that your regular aurors wouldn't have to monitor if they are breaking the statute or not, but could just lay back and intervene only after the muggle authorities are alerted of suspicious bank balance that otherwise wouldn't rise any eyebrows.

 

https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Ministry_Bill_to_make_Muggle-hunting_legal

I was thinking about this quote, but I couldn't remember what it said exactly so I said baiting. It implies that 'muggle hunting' would have been legal at some point either prior to the creation of the statute of secrecy, prior to the creation of the Ministry, or just prior to that attempt to get the bill pushed through. It also implies that Muggle hunting was a relatively common practice, and either legal or unregulated, perhaps somewhat like dog fighting or fox hunting at certain points in history. I think you could argue that the practice was within living memory at the time they tried to push that bill through, otherwise it would have been complete political suicide to propose it.

So if muggle hunting was practiced in Walburga Black's generation, even if it wasn't legal, it makes complete sense to me that muggle baiting would have been a lot more commonplace. Maybe the advent of television and more widespread newspapers and radios made keeping a tighter control on the practice a lot more important, but it still doesn't seem to be all that tightly controlled by 1992.

Obviously we have examples of Morfin Gaunt and Percival Dumbledore being arrested for harming or killing muggles in the 19th and 20th centuries, but they weren't wealthy or well connected wizards as far as we know.

Having a look through the wiki, Willie Widdershins was also let off the hook for muggle baiting by Umbridge because he passed on a bit of information to her about the creation of what amounted to a student club. If senior government officials can make the charges go away that easily, it can't be seen as all that big of a deal.

Tarquin McTavish was imprisoned for trapping a Muggle in a teapot though, so it probably just depends on your connections, the severity of the crime, and the auror who happens to catch you.

 

For everyone who's saying that it's inconsistently applied and inconsistently perceived, that's how it works in real life; there's countless examples of a cop or a judge letting someone off for something; my Latin teacher was let off years ago for speeding home because Rocky III was on. The Department of Magical Law Enforcement and the Office for the Improper Use of Magic, when not completely corrupt, are shown to at the very least have the same kinds of human error and overuse of discretion that real life entities demonstrate. I'm sure that the only reason that Harry was caught in two seconds flat for Dobby's Hover Charm was because he was being specifically monitored after a weird story about an accidental death came out. I'm sure sometimes a spell doesn't look that harmful and they assume it was nothing. What I very much doubt is that you could make an entire career out of muggle baiting unless you built a whole army to do it with you.

 

Depends on what you mean by career and muggle baiting. Is it confounding your customers so that they don't question where you got the supplies for the magical home renovation you did? I don't think that would be even slightly illegal, and could easily have you living comfortably with a few days of work every month.

Is it confounding an old millionaire to alter their will to "reward their loyal old friend"?

Is it smuggling cocaine over borders, shrunk and under concealment magic? And fleecing the criminals you sell it to?

Bellatrix was able to casually use AK out in the open in a muggle neighborhood next to a known address of a known half-blood who really should have been on multiple watch lists while the Ministry was at it's most war-time paranoid under Scrimgeour, and nothing happened. I really don't think the Ministry cares much until you actually get caught by the muggles doing something fishy.

 

I agree with Taure that it's exceptionally likely that they ignore the use of the Confundus, especially if it's a one-off. If it's a slow day, though, perhaps they would check out the circumstances. Nothing more than what we have cited is stated, though so I suppose there's nowhere else to go with that. Bellatrix was able to do a lot more than that; she was able to kill multiple people precisely because the Ministry was rah-rah wartime paranoid. Paranoid people are rarely thinking clearly. For all of Scrimgeour's propaganda, did his government accomplish anything? Did he accomplish anything before the position was dropped on him? Amelia Bones was murdered in her own home. I'm reasonably certain that throwing Stan Shunpike in prison (might have been a bus driver for the wrong person once, shame on him) was supposed to be read as a failure of the administration rather than a success, especially when he's shown to be radicalized later.

 

Sure the Scrimgeour ministry was utterly incompetent, as was the Fudge ministry. The point remains, though, that everything in canon points at the ministry being unable of tracking and preventing even overtly illegal magic use beyond the trace; that Scrimgeour was unable to do so even when his whole platform was "tough on crime" just makes it more obvious.

Which leaves a lot of room for a wizard to make a comfortable living in the muggle world using magic.

 

We also have to consider the fact that the Government is incapable of tracing unforgiveable curses being cast.

If its easy to police magic in the muggle world through tracing. Then the same principle should apply to stuff like the killing curse or other dark magic.

I can understand not being able to trace normal everyday spells due to the sheer volume. But not alot of people are going around casting unforgiveable curses.

Hell, they could have even traced anyone who cast the dark mark during the first war with voldemort.

 

I personally never got the impression that the Ministry would overly care how much magic you use in the muggle world as long as you dont risk exposing the statue of secrecy, dont use magic that is regulated/restricted and dont behave too immoraly with muggles.
Like what reason does the ministry have to care if a wizard makes a fortune by using Arithmancy by gaming the stock market for example.

 

I guess that depends on the exchange rate. The "canon" rate is like 5GBP to 1 Galleon right? Maybe the fear of some billionaire in the muggle world liquidating all of his muggle money and flooding the market with his nice, shiny, 200,000,000 galleons?

 

We really don't know enough of how the monetary system works (because it really isn't important the same way the tax policy of Aragorn isn't), but there needs to be an exchange rate simply because there are goods that are valuable in both the muggle and wizarding world.

In any kind of sane monetary system the exchange rate would be floating, so someone wanting to change billion pounds into galleos would likely completely ruin the day for those muggle parents just wanting to get school supplies for their kids. That said, nothing points at wizards being sane, and if the goblins have the means to just produce 200M new galleons out of thin air based on some ministry law, I bet those fuckers would gleefully accept to do so.

 

There could be multiple exchange rates, like in some countries with weak currencies. One official exchange rate, set by the Ministry, has strict criteria for who can use it, and how much they can exchange in one go. It has favourable numbers that couldn't be maintained if they could be used in unlimited amounts, allowing muggle parents to have a non-zero buying power (and perhaps a little corruption on the side). The other is the black market rate, which does float. The main difference is that the foreign (muggle) money is the weak currency here, instead of the strong one.

 

"How can Muggleborns be Utilized better?"

A bit and bridle? Some sort of tack and harness, surely?

 

Use them as potions ingredients!

 

Hahaha, I agree, its not the best title for a thread I could have come up with

 

Nah, the title's fine; it's just too... exploitable for someone like myself to leave alone.