I would bet that every anecdote you have read about falls into that category, that's why they picked out those anecdotes, that's why they use anecdotes instead of statistics. See what I am saying about that?

I have read them all and not one where they had to "to pay massive amounts of money to get their stuff back " and in all of them they do in fact get their stuff back when they are not actually selling drugs.
In many of the cases the person doesn't even have to go to court, just provide some documentation to the police. In other cases you can go to court without a lawyer if you have the documentation that your property is legit, but of course all of that is premised on the "victims" being actually innocent which overwhelmingly in these cases they are not.
If you have $500,000 how do they know if it is legit or you stole it or it is drug money? It is suspicious just because there isn't any legal reason for that, that's a reasonable suspicion unless it's Monty Burns getting ready to board his hot air balloon to drop silver dollars on people. And of course Mr. Smithers would have a withdrawal slip or some other document.

Indeed the people pushing this issue never talk about how most people just forfeit the property because they don't want to incriminate themselves in their criminal case because that fact ruins their whole misleading supposition based on the disparity between the rate of convictions and the rate of seizures and that would ruin the whole specious argument.