What Can be Seized?

Assets processed by the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture Program (DOJ AFP) can usually be placed in one of three categories:

Personal Property (e.g. vehicles, cash, jewelry, electronics, firearms)
Real Property (e.g. residential real estate, vacant land, and commercial real estate)
Complex Assets (e.g. financial instruments and businesses)

Why Asset Forfeiture?

There are many important reasons to use asset forfeiture to fight criminal behavior.

First and foremost, it effectively takes away the principal incentive for committing a crime — the ill-gotten gains — further punishing the criminal for breaking the law.
Asset forfeiture also removes the tools essential to conducting the criminal’s trade, hampering their ability to further victimize innocent parties in the future.
Perhaps the most valuable of the program’s outcomes is the use of asset forfeiture to protect and benefit those innocent parties previously harmed by criminal activity. As mentioned in the slide above, the program has been successfully used to seize crack houses and turn them over to nonprofit organizations to redevelop neighborhoods blighted by drugs and crime. In other applications, forfeited property — including cash, jewelry, and luxury cars — has been used to return billions of dollars to victims of fraud in restitution.