You are conflating two different things. Asset forfeiture for assets used in a crime and asset seizure of stolen assets. The former the government generally keeps as it has no rightful owner (eg a car purchased with drug proceeds) while the latter is dispersed among aggrieved parties as equitably as possible based on the amount recovered (Bernie Madoff; Mt Gox; David Brooks; etc).
> conflating two different things ... asset seizure of stolen assets
Yeah, seems like I was, in the general case of stolen assets, sorry. My example applies to the more limited case of sale of stolen assets to a buyer, where there's enough conspiracy between seller and buyer, and the buyer is an unpleasant career fence. It happens often enough: there's a specialized network of fences (dealers in stolen goods). Given the efforts the parties make to keep their operation covert, conspiracy is easy for the government to allege. And the civil forfeiture against the money used to buy the goods proceeds without a hitch. Yet the fence is not indicted.It happens at scale, you can be sure that false positives (honest citizens who happen to look bad) get burned too.
Except of course that if a car is purchased with drug proceeds the government will keep the car AND get the money back from the vendor if they can.
So if they actually manage to do that (obviously people don't generally commit crimes because they're swimming in money), then no, this is wrong information.
