BleepingComputer.com: Win 7 Antivirus 2012 - Prosecution?

I don't know if this is appropriate to this forum or not but here goes. During my experience with ZeroAccess I got the Win 7 Antivirus 2012 infection. As I understand it this program will prompt you to pay money to get it to go away, which it probably won't.

My question is this: Shouldn't someone in law enforcement be able to put in a credit card and follow the money trail? I mean, the credit card company will pay out which means that money has to land in an account somewhere, right? After it's in an account, monitor it until funds are withdrawn/transferred and, BAM, one less hacker/pest on the internet. What am I missing here?

This post has been edited by Budapest: 15 December 2011 - 04:47 PM
Reason for edit: Moved from AII ~Budapest

A lot of the kind of phishing you are talking about originates from countries like Russia. This kind of thing is the way of the Russian mob. And you can be sure that these experienced criminals are smart enough to make sure any paper trail leads nowhere. That's why the Cayman Islands exist. Not to mention that most of them are in an unenforcable jurisdiction. So it would be nice if finding scammers was that simple...but it ain't.

ARBOR Networks Attack Sources Map
Identifying the country of origin for a malware PE executable
Spam Sources by Country (2011)
Malware and Spam by Country (2009)

Kaspersky: US is the biggest source of malware (2011)
A Global View of Malware Threats: Which Countries Spread Them (2011)
Symantec finds China top source of malware (2010)
Korea reigns as king of malware threats (2010)