There are a couple reasons. Sometimes they are. However, the recipients are often also romance/work from home scam victims. It can be hard/impossible to prove their intent.
Best case scenario is, assuming they are in on it, that they are a money mule and will immediately split up the money, transfer it 5-10 times (sometimes to themselves, sometimes to other people), and after several jumps, it usually ends up as bitcoin, if you get that far.
Every single transfer of money requires going to a judge and getting a search warrant for the next account or accounts. Each search warrant takes several weeks to a couple months for the bank to respond. So if the money jumps 5 times, we are taking pages and pages of search warrants before we find out where the money truly went. Probably over a year. Probably into crypto. Probably overseas.
The prosecutors would love to prosecute the scammer, but are typically left with someone who just passed on the money and says they had no idea there was a scam happening.
I'm a local law enforcement officer in California who investigates these. I love working on these cases, but there are tons of issues that stop them from being prosecuted successfully other than laziness. Ask me anything.
Best case scenario is, assuming they are in on it, that they are a money mule and will immediately split up the money, transfer it 5-10 times (sometimes to themselves, sometimes to other people), and after several jumps, it usually ends up as bitcoin, if you get that far.
Every single transfer of money requires going to a judge and getting a search warrant for the next account or accounts. Each search warrant takes several weeks to a couple months for the bank to respond. So if the money jumps 5 times, we are taking pages and pages of search warrants before we find out where the money truly went. Probably over a year. Probably into crypto. Probably overseas.
The prosecutors would love to prosecute the scammer, but are typically left with someone who just passed on the money and says they had no idea there was a scam happening.