I'd think these criminals must have a way to "properly" do money laundering without getting caught too easily, e.g. sending to an account they control that can't really be tracked down to a person, cashing out in a country with near zero regulation of cryptocurrency, then somehow getting real money out of it. It would be surprising if this isn't already an entire business out there.

+1, it's gotten pretty easy to do bitcoin tracing these days IIRC. there's definitely cash out methods but for this large of a sum, seems like it'd be difficult?

Just generate new wallet and never touch it again :D

An address is essentially a random number, it would be as safe to send to a random number they generated as one that Satoshi generated.

Now using it further from there might indeed be problematic... but also a champaign problem.

Yes but random throws someone random under the bus (potentially) and doesn't carry the bragging rights GP suggests.

I wasn't suggesting they could pay to someone else. They could pay to their own address at no more risk than paying the genesis block address.

The risk to them comes when they try to spend the funds later. They'd always have the option of dumping them on something unconnected to them for bragging rights with relatively low marginal risk.