The problem is that there are so many people who steal mass amounts of credit cards that there's a glut of them on the market. There's really no other way for them to protect their liabilities--these guys can sell their data, vanish, and make another heist without being caught, while someone actually using the credit card faces a lot more risk.

I read somewhere that cybercrime is extremely specialized; there are people who collect credit card numbers, people who broker them, people who extract money from them, people who launder that money, etc.