How do they "launder" the gold/gems though? Do they send the gold by mail to lots of different characters? Trade in game with other characters?

Theoretically Blizzard must be able to retrace the flow of the stolen property and ban all accounts involved. You would think they would examine the way in which they operate and come up with changes in how we trade in the game to complicate, block and easily track the techniques these bastards use.

I can see how a large amount of micro transactions can be generated to complicate tracking them and if they randomly include some legitimate accounts then you cannot just wield the ban stick with wild abandon. But they can also have only so many accounts under their control and once Blizzard flags an account as compromised all trades with that account becomes suspicious immediately.

They should also be able to detect a pattern in compromised accounts (the systematic stripping of characters) and if that is combined with a recent password reset on the account then maybe they should put a 24hr or 48hr block on that account to see if they are contacted about the account being stolen.

But instead of addressing the issue on their side they push it down to us requiring us to buy hardware from them. Much like their AFK flagging solution in BGs.