I came across the following article
- Allen Goldmann, A person is trying to hide $5 million in stolen Bitcoins from a Darknet marketplace, Forbes, November 28, 2022
where some criminal tried to launder stolen 300 bitcoins with mixer "desperately creating new wallet addresses".
There is a lot of forensic techniques which let tracing crypto within same blockchain easily enough, so my question is very simple: why not just convert stolen bitcoin to other crypto based on different blockchain (chain hopping)?
P.S I assume that tracing will be stopped in the point of transfering between blockchains (you transfer from wallet A1 to wallet A2 of blockchain A and get the funds on wallet B1 from wallet B2 belonging blockchain B)