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Liquidity question. If you send a crook a bunch of btc, and they eventually use that btc, isn’t it pretty easy to trace the transactions all the way? How do these people get to liquidate or use these ransom payments without leaving a long papertrail of everything they did with the money?

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I think they'd usually use one of the non-KYC exchanges to move the money into an anonymous cryptocurrency, and then out to whatever they wanted. I'm not sure why they don't skip the intermediate step and just ask for Monero or whatever. Maybe they think the mark will be more familiar with BTC and thus more likely to deliver?

They use money mules. Hundreds or thousands of regular people who have access to a Bitcoin ATMs with the promise of a small comission. They hire them in forums. They hand over to other proxies and you lose the trace at that point. At least, most of it.

Nonsense, nobody does this after they already have bitcoin. Such mules are used when you want to receive and cash out illicit bank transfers into bitcoin.

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