Submitted by Wendals87 t3_ypkcsg in todayilearned
Weirdly as an american this makes sense to me, if your countries laws of civil asset forfeiture includes speculative assets, and i dont believe ours do, yet, if you sell said speculative assets for a profit you should turn the rest back even if they were guilty, cause if you don't it incentivesis bad actors in government and law enforcement to steal everything they can. It's a serious problem here down south, small town sherifs will pull you over and claim any large amount as drug money, take that money, and your car, because they don't charge you with a crime, your car is charged with a crime, and then your just fucked as the da will tell you he's not giving a trial to a car, and when you allow that to go on long enough you get shit like the cash for kids scandal, it flies in the face of everything I believe too, but it's the correct action, law must only be motivated by law, never for profit.
Charge them with stealing 100k of assets, and seize the bitcoin with them not seeing profits or losses from the change of value later.
You cant really have it both ways, you can't not recognize any crypto as a currency, force all action policing through the standard enforcement agiences by declaring it a security, and then have those same agencies use currency laws to skirt the law in their favor when a person holding said securities happens to be bad. Securities are securities, doesn't matter who sells em, the purchaser is owed the lions share, and I say this because in cases in crypto where someone stole your crypto, they use the bitcoin is a security challenge in order to get it back to you, you take that away and international law doesn't have to investigate shit, I admit this is one of the slipriest fucking slopes in history, but last I checked Europe actually gets to vote on individual issues like this, and until yall put forth a referendum on what crypto actually is truly classified as in europe, and vote on that shit, I believe this was the right call
Now that the value has fallen do they need to pay the government 300k euros? Once the payment is settled there should be no back and forth, the value changing two years later should not be relevant. I also wouldn't expect the government to say "Hey you owe us 80k more euros because we decided to hodl and it turned out the value fell."
It's value at sale, that's the point of a security
They don't because civil asset forfeiture is not designed to be deployed against the wealthy. If you have a lawyer on retainer the police are not going to bother trying to steal your stuff this way
They dont yet, but once it's mainstream watch how quick they try to get that shit added to a list of possible drug assets
If you get convicted of something the government can definitely sieze your crypto. It's not like they can pull you over and find a pile of bitcoins in your trunk though.
What's to stop someone from reporting the police stole their car? If they don't charge you with a crime then how is it not being stolen?
Civil forfeiture
I've definitely heard of cops Stealing people's money under that guise, but not their cars. Generally if they take your car they are charging you for something.
They will take cars, houses, xboxs, literally anything that they say is the product of an illicit activity. They can do this under suspicion. There are numerous cases of the DAs saying there's insufficient evidence, so the owner is never charged with anything, but it's then incumbent on them (the "owner") to proove the negative (that it wasn't purchased with illegally attained funds) to get things back.
Also because you arent charged, you arent legally entitled to a lawyer from the state, so you gotta pay for that one yourself if you want to sue THEM to get YOUR stuff back.
-Edit: Specifically the cars bit is where they'd pull over Black or Hispanic guys in fancy SUVs or sportscars coming up from Miami and if there's cash in the car, just take everything under suspicion of drug money.
They can use it on cars and houses
buy Sudafed from two different stores in the same week, and you can lose your house.
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The police will choose not to investigate, and the da will choose not to prosecute.
Stealing people's cash in civil forfeiture is a shell game for them, they hand the cash quickly off to the feds so you can't get it back easily. For your car they have it in the impound lot, if you don't get charged they have to give it back. You will still probably have to get a lawyer and pay impound fees.
In civil asset forfeiture the police don't charge you with a crime, they just suspect you. They charge your property with a crime and take it away. The property is considered guilty until proven innocent, so you have to hire a lawyer and prove your property wasn't being used for crime. Otherwise they just get to keep it.
Seconded
Yeah that's the conundrum, you can't really report the police to the police, you have to go to the local media, of you get lucky enough it gets picked up by a major outlet and you get a leg to stand on leverage wise, like this.
But not every story makes it national, so a lot of people are just forced to eat it, and even when you do make it national the tactic has been to bounce you from court to court refusing to make a ruling. Hell tyson timbs had to take his lawsuit to the Supreme Court and just got his truck back, a $45000 land rover that he bought with the inheritance he got when his dad died, But yeah a few months later he fell off the wagon, HARD! And at his lowest moment, for 225 dollars worth of drugs they threw him in jail gave him probabtion and house arrest, a 1200 dollar fine, but they also stole his brand new truck, the one he refused to sell at his worst because it was all he had left of his dad, and he like had a receipt, with banking transfers, ya know the kind you would get on a purchase like that because you don't want beef with the irs, and they just turned around and said nope, trucks guilty. That started in 2012
To address your second point, the police are effectively allowed to steal from people if they seem like "criminals". The police act like civil asset forfeiture is only ever used against cartel assassins and crack dealers so it's hard to limit their authority.
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