Germany’s Bundestag adopted a customs reform on 12 November that lets the Zollverwaltung investigate, seize and ultimately confiscate assets worth more than €100,000 when their lawful origin
Germany’s Bundestag adopted a customs reform on 12 November that lets the Zollverwaltung investigate, seize and ultimately confiscate assets worth more than €100,000 when their lawful origin cannot be plausibly explained. The definition of an asset in the operative text covers crypto. The vote came in the second and third reading by show of hands: AfD, CDU/CSU and SPD in favour, Die Linke against, Bündnis 90/Die Grünen abstaining, according to the plenary record of the 108th sitting.
The chamber adopted the finance committee’s version, Drucksache 21/9136, of the government’s draft on Drucksache 21/8282. Members on all sides called it the Zollfinanzgerechtigkeitsgesetz, or ZFG. The formal title is longer and administrative: a law for more justice through strengthening the customs administration and combating financial crime. Under Article 26 it enters into force on 1 January 2027, with several articles staged later.
The crypto relevance does not come from a dedicated crypto statute. Article 1 rewrites the Finanzverwaltungsgesetz and inserts a block of sections headed “administrative asset investigation and securing”, known in the debate as aVES. Article 3 rewrites the seizure, confiscation and disposal provision in the Zollverwaltungsgesetz. Between them, the two articles decide which assets customs may take, on what suspicion, for how long, and what happens when the owner cannot document where the money came from.
Section 53 of the amended Finanzverwaltungsgesetz sets the trigger: customs authorities may use the special measures when factual indications suggest that significant assets are not of lawful origin. The same section keeps criminal-procedure duties in front of the new powers, stating that obligations under the Strafprozessordnung and the prosecution’s authority take precedence.
Section 56 then sets the clock. Customs may seize and take custody of a significant asset for up to 30 days to clarify its origin. A court can extend that once, by a further 150 days, if further investigative steps are not obviously hopeless and the doubts about lawful origin have been made plausible. The extension decision is taken by a single judge of the competent Finanzgericht, without an oral hearing, by an unappealable order. In total, the pre-court seizure window is 180 days.
Section 57 lists the investigative powers that fill those days, and Section 60 governs the next step: if the measures leave reasoned doubts about lawful origin, the authority applies in writing to the court for a confiscation order. The applicant is the Federal Republic of Germany; the respondent is the person the order would target. Filing the application suspends the statutory deadlines until a final court decision.
Section 59 opens a second, faster route. If the person concerned, the owner or the beneficial owner admits the assets are not of lawful origin, or reports further suspicious assets on that basis, the authority may confiscate the assets itself, without going to court. Where the owner is unknown or the admitting party may not be the owner, the operative part of the confiscation must be published in the Bundesanzeiger. Once the confiscation becomes final, the assets pass into the ownership of the Federation.
Section 54 defines what counts as an asset. Alongside tangible and intangible property, legal titles and claims, it names “other rights in rem”, and states that these include crypto-assets within the meaning of Article 3, paragraph 1, number 5 of Regulation (EU) 2023/1114, the MiCA framework, as well as other comparable digital representations of a value or a right. That reference is why a law about customs organisation reaches self-custodied tokens and exchange balances alike.
The same section carries a cumulative rule that matters more than the definition. Where several assets are so closely connected that uniform treatment appears warranted, they form a single asset for the purposes of the law. A holder whose wallets, accounts or positions are treated as one pool can therefore cross the significance threshold without any single item being large.
Significance is set in Section 54, paragraph 2. An asset is significant when its value exceeds €100,000, or when its value exceeds €50,000 and a duty exists to register it in a public register maintained by a public body. The text lists vehicle registers, land registers, ship registers and the aircraft roll as examples. For crypto there is no such register, so the operative figure is €100,000. The section adds that the value may be estimated, which leaves valuation method to administrative practice rather than to the statute.
At the spot prices quoted on 15 November, €100,000 is roughly 1.68 bitcoin or about 60 ether, using Coinbase’s euro quotes of €59,644.56 per bitcoin and €1,668.75 per ether around 12:35 UTC, as tracked on CoinGecko. A holder above that line is inside the scope of a procedure that did not exist in German customs law a week ago.
Article 3 replaces Section 42 of the Zollverwaltungsgesetz, which deals with lifting a seizure, confiscation, realisation and destruction. The new text gives the holder of the asset, or its owner, two years from the moment of seizure to demonstrate a use that creates no danger of the kind described in Section 40. If they do, the authority lifts the seizure. The deadline can be extended by six months on request, and by a further six months in justified cases.
If the danger is not removed within those deadlines, the authority may confiscate the asset. Confiscation can come earlier, at the point when specific facts make it foreseeable that the seizure will not be lifted. The order must be notified in writing to the person concerned and to the owner; a prior hearing is required only for the early route.
Two procedural details give the provision its force. Section 42 states that no objection is available against the confiscation, and that an action contesting it has no suspensive effect. Confiscated items are in principle to be realised by public auction, which may take place online through the customs auction platform zollauktion.de. Cash and account balances are excluded from that auction rule. The proceeds take the place of the item, and the text sets out when an item must instead be destroyed, including where an auction fails or where realisation would predictably recreate the conditions for confiscation.
Germany is not designing this in isolation. The United States took a comparable step in the same month: the Justice Department obtained court authority to seize or restrain more than $1.2 billion of assets stolen from Binance, as reported separately, and pursued the infrastructure behind a North Korean social-engineering campaign. The difference is procedural. Washington moved through criminal and national-security channels; Berlin is building an administrative route that runs before, and alongside, a criminal case.
Section 58 creates a cooperation duty rather than a presumption of guilt. The person concerned, the owner or the beneficial owner is to be asked to present suitable receipts, documents or other records and useful information on the origin of the assets. The same section requires the authority to instruct them that they are not obliged to produce the evidence or make the statements, and that anything they do provide may be used in tax proceedings and in criminal proceedings.
Section 54, paragraph 3 defines when doubts are “reasoned”. The test is whether, looking at all relevant circumstances, lawful acquisition of the asset, or acquisition with funds of lawful origin, does not appear plausible. The overall assessment must include the statements of the holder, the owner and the beneficial owner. It may also weigh whether declared income and wealth stand in reasonable proportion to the asset’s value, whether ownership and beneficial ownership are transparent, and whether the asset is held by or at the disposal of a person previously convicted of a property offence or a serious offence, a criminal organisation, or a member of one.
The finance committee added one criterion expressly: false statements by the person concerned are to be taken into account in that assessment. Ingo Vogel of the SPD told the chamber that the change does not convert the procedure into automatic confiscation. “Das ist keine automatische Einziehung, das ist auch keine pauschale Beweislastumkehr,” he said, meaning that it is neither an automatic confiscation nor a blanket reversal of the burden of proof.
Section 61 gives the Finanzgericht in whose district the customs authority sits jurisdiction over the confiscation order. The committee version deleted the paragraph that would have let the senate routinely transfer a case to one of its members as a single judge, keeping the senate principle for the confiscation decision. The procedural rules of the Finanzgerichtsordnung apply to the court phase, with the applicant in the claimant’s role. The respondent is to be invited to comment in writing within one month of service.
The committee also closed an operational gap. The seizure is now to continue when a case passes into criminal proceedings, so the administrative track and the criminal track can run in parallel instead of one displacing the other. Section 53 already gives criminal-procedure obligations priority over the new measures; the committee change keeps the seizure alive while those obligations are discharged.
Vogel framed the instrument as the point where prosecution has not yet begun. “Dieses Instrument setzt dann an, wenn jemand über erhebliche Vermögenswerte verfügt, deren rechtmäßige Herkunft überhaupt nicht plausibel ist, aber wir noch nicht an dem Punkt sind, dass wir ein klassisches Strafverfahren anstreben,” he said. His summary of the purpose was blunter: “Kriminelle Strukturen, Organisierte Kriminalität und Finanzkriminalität leben nicht von Paragrafen. Sie leben vom Geld.”
The committee’s cost table puts the price of the reform at about €82 million of one-off conversion spending in 2027 and €1 million in 2028, plus roughly €8.8 million a year for staff and IT from 2028 to 2030. Total additional spending in the first four years is put at about €109 million. The Bundeskriminalamt takes on about €28.4 million in one-off costs and €26.9 million a year; the Interior Ministry adds €365,000 a year. From 2028 the committee expects additional revenue of about €308 million a year.
The arithmetic behind that expectation is worth stating plainly. The forecast annual take is about 2.8 times the entire four-year setup cost, and about 35 times the annual staff and IT line. It is also about 0.31% of the €100 billion annual tax loss that Isabelle Vandre of Die Linke cited in the same debate.
Vandre voted against, and her objection was about scale rather than principle. “Ja, die Novellierung der Zollstruktur und die Einführung der administrativen Vermögensabschöpfung sind notwendige und richtige Maßnahmen. Aber … sind Tippelschritte,” she said, calling the measures baby steps. On the revenue line she was specific: “Sie planen 308 Millionen Euro ein, die mit dem ZFG reingeholt werden sollen. Das ist schlicht und ergreifend zu wenig.” She also asked where the promised crypto taxation had gone.
Vogel conceded that he had wanted more, saying he could personally have imagined wider powers within the principle of reversing the burden of proof, and that the solution found is what is constitutionally possible after intensive consultation.
The immediate exposure falls on holders of assets located in Germany whose ownership trail is thin: long-held self-custody positions bought in cash or through channels that no longer produce statements, assets inherited without documentation, and balances held for third parties. Exchanges, custodians and payment providers are exposed in a different way, because a customs request for origin documents reaches them as third parties holding someone else’s assets. Practitioners working with mixed or pooled holdings face the aggregation rule first, since the threshold applies to the pool.
Several things remain unsettled. Adoption is not promulgation: the law still has to be published in the Bundesgesetzblatt, and the staged commencement in Article 26 means not every provision starts on 1 January 2027. The statute sets a euro threshold and allows estimation but does not prescribe a valuation method for volatile assets, which leaves the moment of valuation and the pricing source to administrative practice. There is no crypto-specific guidance in the text on how a holder demonstrates lawful origin for coins acquired years ago through platforms that no longer exist.
The wider context is the FATF-driven strengthening of customs as a financial-crime authority, which the committee report places under the ministry’s “Zoll 2030” programme and links to the coalition’s commitments on money laundering. Germany is building an asset-recovery capacity that sits beside criminal prosecution rather than inside it, and the crypto provisions inherit that design: an administrative procedure, a financial court, a two-year proof window, and an auction platform that already sells seized goods. What the text does not do is create an offence, charge anyone, or require a conviction before assets change hands.
For readers holding crypto in Germany, the practical question is documentation, not price. The procedure begins with a request for receipts and a warning that answering is voluntary and that answers travel to tax and criminal files. That warning is the point at which a holder should be talking to a lawyer rather than assembling statements alone, because anything produced becomes usable far beyond the customs file that requested it.
