EU, UK AND SEVEN MORE SIGN EUROPE’S CRYPTO CRIME PROTOCOL — ASSETS CAN BE FROZEN “WITHOUT PRIOR NOTICE”

On Oct. 14, 2026, in Strasbourg, the European Union and eight countries signed a new protocol to the Council of Europe’s Warsaw Convention on criminal money: Georgia, Greece, Hungary, Luxembourg, Monaco, Montenegro, San Marino and the United Kingdom. The Council says the protocol strengthens the power to confiscate assets, “including crypto-assets,” obtained through crime.

The Council’s own words: authorities “will be able to freeze or seize assets urgently, where appropriate, without prior notice.” Courts can confiscate property linked to wider criminal conduct, “in some cases without a criminal conviction.” When member states adopted the text in May 2026, the Council said intelligence units get data from “virtual-asset service providers” and fast access to data on “crypto-asset owners via central automated or similarly effective mechanisms.”

Bitcoin.com, in its report on the signing, wrote that crypto can be confiscated without notice. The Council’s page says freeze or seize. Confiscation still goes through a court. Either way, every one of these powers runs through someone who holds coins for you: an exchange, a custodian, a register of owners. An order can lock an account. It cannot sign a bitcoin transaction.

Signing is the first step. Each state still has to ratify before the protocol binds it, and the Council has 46 member states, so the list will grow. For anyone in Europe the question is the old one. Who holds your keys, and will they move when an order arrives with no warning? At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,048.