The gang producing them got so overwhelmed with burning CDs in their basement, that they went to a factory in Germany.
Police looked at the serial number on the CD, went to the factory and asked who the customer was and that's how they got busted.
Organized crime also does a lot of "dumb" stuff but they do it at scale and make it harder to trace back the individual incident to the organization's core. They also heavily rely on disposable accomplices, which is why you still see these "make money doing nothing from home, just let us use your bank account" scams.
You would be mistaken btw to think this only applies to non-western parts of the world. The spectrum is a wide one, from completely covert operations, over organized crime, to companies and even the government itself. The ones who are caught are usually not the smart ones. Of course, the Dunning Kruger effect is also strong here, so most of them think they're too smart to be caught.
Bitcoin (and most other cryptocoins) needs a bit of effort to grovel the public transaction history, and XMR does things that supposedly make that not really work at all, but other than that...
Any source? Can't find anything.
I'm not qualified to say whether that actually achieves that goal though
Which would limit what you could do with the money, but isn't that true of any crime related money?
Outside of cash transfer services which often also require an ID on both ends albeit that is often easier to fake there aren’t ways to transfer money anonymously.
So companies use either alternative settlement methods such as crypto or gift cards or what is also quite common twin settlement.
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Basically the idea here is to split the records across as many platforms as possible and have as much separation as possible from payments and actual usage.
whats funnier is those who run these booter sites then ACCEPTS payment with paypal. dios mio