Police seized my crypto: how to defend frozen or confiscated assets

What it looks like and how it differs

The markers: the platform cites a "request from a competent authority", refuses to disclose details, and support replies with a template and no timeframe. Or the assets have been seized directly: a hardware wallet taken during a search, funds taken on arrest.

The defence procedure

1. A lawyer's request for the basis of the measure. What measure, imposed by whom and when, in which jurisdiction. It is easier for the platform to answer a lawyer: a formal legal request goes to the legal department.
2. Establishing your status. Are you a witness, a third party or a suspect? Your status determines both the strategy and what you can safely say. Until that is clear, make no statements and sign nothing.
3. A file on the lawful origin of the assets — needed by both the authority and the court; the structure is the same as for exchange source of funds requests.
4. Challenging the measure: an application to lift the freeze, excluding assets from its scope (for example a demonstrably clean portion), and where the hit is sanctions-related, a delisting application or a licence to release the funds.

Timescales and expectations

The horizon is months: 3–12 in a typical case, longer where international requests are involved. Only one thing speeds it up: an active procedural position. A freeze that nobody challenges can last for years — the authorities are in no hurry.

The instruments behind the seizure — and the defences they leave open

The first legal distinction is between criminal confiscation, which follows a conviction, and civil forfeiture, where the state proceeds against the assets themselves without convicting anyone — the burden of proof and the available defences differ fundamentally. In the UK, both routes run through the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 (POCA), which since the 2023 reforms contains crypto-specific seizure and forfeiture powers; alongside sit restraint orders (freezing assets during an investigation), production orders (compelling an exchange to hand over account records) and, for unexplained asset positions, unexplained wealth orders. Sanctions cases are a separate track entirely: an OFAC-administered freeze is lifted not by litigation but by delisting or a specific licence authorising the release.

For anyone whose assets were frozen through no fault of their own — the classic case is receiving funds that were tainted upstream — the third-party or innocent-owner defence exists in most regimes, but it must be asserted actively and on time. A seizure nobody challenges hardens into forfeiture by default.

The single most common mistake we see after a seizure is the client answering questions before their status is clear — witness, third party or suspect are three very different positions, and what’s safe to say changes completely between them. We’ve taken on cases months into a freeze that could have moved faster if the first conversation with the authority had gone through a lawyer’s formal request instead of a direct reply to an officer.

Mark Eichorn · Managing Partner