There is a significant distinction between the government declaring that money (/other goods) is another party's property and returning possession to the rightful owner (ie equity), and the government declaring that something was earned through an illegal activity and thereby transferring it to themselves (ie taking).
Sure, but both are under the flag of Civil Asset Forfeiture. We should definitely make it so corrupt departments aren't funding themselves with spurious CAF, but it's useful to acknowledge that many use cases of CAF make complete sense and provide a public good.
Giving the government a way to cheat will definitely create some good results. But that doesn't mean having the way to cheat is a good thing.
I noted a clear distinction for the case you listed. A traditional joint civil suit against Madoff would have done the exact same thing with a similar amount of process. It's true that access to our legal system is way too expensive in general, but creating a backdoor for the government and hoping they will use it to help private citizens is not the way to fix that.
