Germany drafts a crypto account lookup, with five-day FIU freezes

Germany's Federal Ministry of Finance wants crypto exchanges inside the account lookup. Under a ministerial draft dated October 28, 2026, crypto-asset service providers would have to feed master data on customer accounts into the procedure under Section 24c of the Banking Act (KWG). Authorities would see which platform holds the account, its opening and closing dates, and whether it still exists. The same draft hands the Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) power to freeze a crypto account for up to five working days on money laundering suspicion, with an objection unable to break the freeze. The paper is a draft moving between government departments, not law in force. Titled the "Act implementing the Sixth EU Anti-Money Laundering Directive and strengthening money laundering prevention," it implements the EU anti-money laundering package of May 31, 2024. Its centre is the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation (EU) 2024/1624, which applies directly across member states from July 10, 2027, alongside AMLD6 and an amendment to the Financial Information Directive that links national account registers across Europe. A new Anti-Money Laundering Act (GwBG) would replace the 2017 law on July 10, 2027. The register holds master data only: account number, opening and closing dates, the holder's name, address and date of birth, plus authorised signatories and beneficial owners. Balances, individual coin holdings and account movements stay out. Platforms that pool customer coins in shared omnibus wallets and track holdings only in internal accounting would have their internal allocation number counted as the account ID, so no customer account escapes the register for lack of an on-chain address. An authority gets transaction history only in a second step, through an information request to the exchange or a court order in criminal proceedings. BaFin queries the system automatically at any time, and the law says the institution must not notice the retrieval. Prosecutors, courts, the Customs Criminological Office and the Central Office for Sanctions Enforcement get data through BaFin. The FIU can query for its own tasks. Private parties have no access at all, not creditors, not an ex-partner. A second route runs through the Fiscal Code. Section 93b AO requires credit institutions to keep the Section 24c file system open to tax authorities, with the Federal Central Tax Office retrieving on the tax office's behalf; Section 93(8) AO adds job centres, social welfare offices, student-grant offices and bailiffs. The tax office may only pull the data in legally defined cases, generally after a request to the taxpayer has failed, and must inform the person beforehand and notify them afterwards. Whether the draft extends that tax route to crypto exchanges is not readable from the published excerpts, which amend Section 24c KWG and the Crypto Markets Supervision Act (KMAG) explicitly. Banks have already been feeding this system for years: public bodies ran about 1.01 million retrievals in 2020 through the Federal Central Tax Office, up from roughly 915,000 in 2019, according to Finance Ministry figures reported by Börsen-Zeitung in January 2021. Crypto accounts have been a blind spot in that count.

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