You're making it sound like the credit card companies are idiots. If a huge portion of their stolen cards are buying an obscure app with a $1000 price tag, they're going to notify the authorities.
Credit card companies don’t have product level insight. They would just see payments to “Apple Inc.,” hardly a rare occurrence for any customer.
Why would the credit card companies even want to stop this? For every transaction they are earning processing fees, the only thing they need is a small amount of plausible deniability to shed any legal liability. They are basically being paid to look the other way.
Laundering money means someone is using their own dirty money in a clean transaction, not further stealing others' money. This is all happening after the initial theft has taken place.