It's easier to track fund transfers than it is to track small snippets of assets being traded and reassigned. The smaller the pieces and the more of them there are going in all different directions in the first few steps the harder it is to find the end destination. Do this multiple times over multiple steps and you create plenty of buffers, because tracking the theft requires investigating every single possible route the assets could've taken. It's all about how much time you have to obscure the latest evidence before the authorities sort out the previous evidence. Shell companies are the corporate version of this sort of scheme.
Thank you. But remember, these are villains we're talking about. They would not care if the world knew they had stolen nuclear secrets. They won't care if they are tracked stealing money. Right?
Let's change it to, emptying 'everyone's' bank account; that kind of chaos would pretty much put a billion people in serious trouble almost immediately.
The point is, why go to the trouble of attempting to attack the most guarded?
