That is really interesting! I'd never heard about it.
I found a German article on Wiki, which gave the following information:
The Überreiter were special police forces for stopping the smuggling and theft of monopoly goods (incl. tobacco and cobalt). They were entitled to search and inspect goods. The badly paid Überreiter were at the lowest level of the civil service; their main sources of income were the "denunciation shares" from seizures and fines. As a result, the Überreiter not only had an extremely poor reputation among the common folk, they were also unpopular with the authorities due to overstepping their own authority and interefering with the jurisdiction.
I am not entirely sure what they mean by "denunciation shares", but their pay obviously came from the results of their work, i.e. the sale of the goods and the fines paid by the smugglers.
Best regards,
Karen
