I would expect only Bitcoin markets to have the liquidity and depth where one can easily buy 5 million worth of coins. Similarly when the hackers want to sell the coins again.
Nah there are dozens of options where you could easily move 5 million a day. They are probably using bitcoin because it's easiest for the victim to pay in. I assume they would rotate it through zcash/monero before they spend it
Ease of access for the victims, I imagine. Going from owning 0 bitcoin to hundreds of thousands seems easier giving it's popularity than say, monero (or whatever the anonymous centric coin of the day is). And the ransomware guys can still wash it later by passing it through intermediate exchanges/selling it for a different crypto.
It's easier to launder and transfer the BTC than to do the same with real money. According to the article, the people behind Darkside were also behind a bitcoin "mixing" service that was recently shut down.
but... Monero. Mixing is fine, but there's fees and overhead that make it undesirable, IMO.
Just curious, what alternatives are there, and how would they work?
Monero for transactions, then change back to BTC for value storage.
They can also ask for ETH and use Tornado cash to launder it.
Check out Monero. I'm a lay person when it comes to cryptography and cryptocurrency, but supposedly an innovation in that currency, known as ring signatures, keeps the blockchain private.
Because even though the transactions can be traced, the accounts holding them are arbitrary. You can observe a Bitcoin transaction propagate through the blockchain, but you'll never really see any personal identifiers besides the address.