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Germany's Bundestag passes customs seizure law covering crypto above €100k

Bundestag passed Drucksache 21/8282 on Nov 12, letting customs provisionally seize suspected illicit assets above €100k — crypto included — pending Bundesrat approval.

by 3 min read
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The German Bundestag passed the Customs Finance Fairness Act (Zollfinanzgerechtigkeitsgesetz) on November 12, authorising customs authorities to provisionally seize assets suspected of illicit origin — crypto explicitly included — before a criminal case is opened. The threshold is €100,000 for most asset classes and €50,000 for registrable items such as real estate and vehicles. Entry into force is set for January 1, 2027, pending Bundesrat approval and promulgation.

What happened

The underlying bill is government draft Drucksache 21/8282 of September 30, 2026, titled Entwurf eines Gesetzes für mehr Gerechtigkeit durch die Stärkung der Zollverwaltung und die Bekämpfung der Finanzkriminalität. The Bundestag held its first reading on October 9, the Finance Committee held a public hearing on November 2, and the plenary vote fell on November 12, with CDU/CSU, SPD and AfD in favour; Die Linke voted against and the Greens abstained. The Bundesrat must still approve before January 1, 2027.

Mechanism

Customs may hold assets for up to 30 days on reasonable suspicion of illicit origin. A finance court can extend that hold by up to 150 days, for a maximum of 180 days. Final confiscation remains a judicial decision — customs seize, courts confiscate. Crypto-assets fall within scope under the EU's MiCA definition, which the law adopts by reference. In practice, a centralised exchange can be ordered to freeze custodied balances; for self-custodied coins, enforcement still requires access to the private keys.

Impact

The law extends to customs a power that previously sat with prosecutors — the ability to immobilise assets without an indictment. It removes the current gap between a flagged inflow (a wallet pulling €100k+ into a German CEX, say) and the first criminal act in a case file. For CEXs operating under German BaFin licences, the operational change is a new category of administrative freeze request from customs rather than only from prosecutors or from BaFin itself.

Numbers

  • General seizure threshold: €100,000
  • Registrable-asset threshold (real estate, vehicles): €50,000
  • Maximum administrative hold: 30 days
  • Court-extended hold: up to 150 additional days (180 days total)
  • Expected annual yield from 2028: ~€308M (government estimate)
  • Reference to money laundered annually in Germany: ~€100B (Max Lucks, Greens, in committee hearing)

What to watch

  1. The Bundesrat vote. A delayed sign-off pushes the January 1, 2027 start date back; a rejection forces a mediation-committee round.
  2. Implementing ordinances covering how customs issues freeze requests to CEXs and custodians — the statute sets scope, but the practical procedure (format, deadlines, review) lives in secondary law.
  3. The first contested case in a finance court. An appellate ruling on "reasonable suspicion" against a self-custodied wallet will set the operational standard for the rest of the regime.
  4. Whether other EU member states — France, Italy, the Netherlands — move to mirror administrative seizure powers for crypto under their own MiCA transposition.

Context

Germany already runs one of the largest state-owned bitcoin positions in Europe, built from prosecutor-led seizures routed through BaFin-licensed custodians. Codifying customs-level administrative seizure takes the model one layer earlier in the enforcement chain. The threshold-plus-court-oversight design echoes the Italian "sequestro conservativo" model more than the UK's Proceeds of Crime Act — a judicial check sits between the seizure and the confiscation, which is the point the committee's academic witness Kilian Wegner (Halle-Wittenberg) called a "workable compromise" while flagging the procedural tension of using administrative law to immobilise alleged criminal gains.

Sources

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