Re: That's a big pile of money
That's the whole point of laundering the money - breaking the trail to make it difficult to identify where the money went.
Classic case was bouncing it between multiple dupes in different jurisdictions, so you have to slowly trace through each bank in turn. Route it through a jurisdiction that doesn't ask many questions and doesn't provide much help to law enforcement and that's half the battle won. Put an (apparently) legitimate purchase or two in the middle, and everything slows right down. It is intentionally difficult to reclaim money from vendors due to the past experience of customers reversing payments once they get the goods. The number of dodgy customers is higher than the number of dodgy vendors, so that's the way things work.
The key for the hackers is to get the money out of the conventional system as fast as possible. By the time the customer has cried Fraud, the money has disappeared. Where it pops up again, who knows. Half the time the laundering is actually done by governments for various purposes. Prime example - the UK government laundered almost a billion dollars worth of IRA funds as part of the NI peace settlement.
There was quite the bizarre set of statements in the Lords back in 2010 where curiously the media comment on it was extremely rapidly quashed.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201011/ldhansrd/text/101101-0003.htm#10110215000101
Start reading from 1 Nov 2010 : Column 1538 onwards.