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At the end of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Newt gives Jacob a bag of magical eggs to use as collateral for his bakery.

But isn't this breaking the Statute of Secrecy? After all, wouldn't they open the box to see what was inside?

The whole point of Newt getting in trouble was that he broke the Statute of Secrecy. How is this not breaking the Statute?

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  • Even just giving it to him and saying what it is after he got obliviated should be problematic...
    – Scimonster
    Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 19:40

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Probably, yes

As you say, this is almost certainly a violation of the Statute of Wizarding Secrecy. Then again, it's probably a low-risk violation, because...

As far as an outside observer can tell, Jacob has a box full of silver shards

Newt mentions earlier in the film that Occamy eggs are pure silver:

Newt: See, their shells are made of silver so they're incredibly valuable.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them: The Original Screenplay

So, as far as Jacob's (possibly) Obliviated mind knows, some anonymous stranger gave him a box filled with shards of pure silver, that happen to be in the shape of eggshells, and a note speaking complete nonsense; there's very little to connect Newt's gift to the existence of wizards and magic.

Likewise, there's no reason Jacob should struggle to use the shells in muggle society:

  • Any muggle who sees the note would assume that it was written by a crazy person
  • Anyone who sees the eggshells (regardless of whether they saw the note) would just see a bunch of fragments of silver, possibly originating from some egg-shaped decoration

Bearing in mind the marvelous human tendency for self-delusion, there's little-to-no reason to connect the box and the note to the existence of magic and wizarding society; you might take it as evidence if you were already inclined to believe that, but it's unlikely to, in and of itself, lead someone to that conclusion.

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    Given that there is well know golden egg jewelry img.dxcdn.com/productimages/sku_191630_1.jpg and even some silver egg jewelry s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/236x/4e/b0/dd/… (this one is supposedly made of platinum, so its even more valuable!) shape is not problem. What might be problem is excuse on where he got something like that. In current world, he might as well be investigated for such thing, unless he had believable excuse.
    – Colombo
    Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 22:41
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    @Colombo - "I inherited it" is usually sufficient to hide a modest one-off quantity of a valuable substance.
    – Valorum
    Commented Dec 5, 2018 at 11:26
  • We even see the niffler discover a hidden cache where Jacob lives. Not too big of a stretch for suspicious muggles to imagine that the secret family inheritance from old Europe was a liiiittle bit more valuable than the actual one (and hard to trace in pre-war America).
    – Annatar
    Commented Dec 5, 2018 at 13:31

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