Product piracy

The German Bundestag passed the amendment of the money laundering criminal offence on 11 February 2020. In the future, prosecution of money laundering will be made easier. Aiding and abetting in the shifting of proceeds from criminal acts will be punishable by law – irrespective of the criminal offence through which they were acquired. Until now, acts of money laundering could only be prosecuted for predicate offences such as drug trafficking, human trafficking or racketeering and similar so-called catalogue offences. This restriction to catalogue offences has now been abolished.

As a result of the amendment, commercial trademark infringement and copyright infringement now constitute predicate offences to a punishable money laundering offence.
This means that payment processing for transactions of criminal product piracy has now been included in the circle of money laundering, so that from now on banks, credit card companies, but also logistics companies will have to pay much more attention to their activities if they do not want to become involved in money laundering proceedings.

In order to limit product piracy, it will therefore be even more important for lawyers to have a look at the service providers of product pirates.