The work of preparing to leave the country is necessarily public in a way that doing crypto stuff might not be. I suspect they were worried that preparing to leave the country would tip their hand - and they could have been caught earlier if they tried it. It just turns out they were caught anyway.
Yea, maybe bring your cat or dog but literally pack like you're going on vacation. If they arrest you before leaving the country then you were screwed already.
Americans don't need to apply for a Visa to visit most of the world. They just get one automatically on arrival.
They could have just bought a Vanuatu passport with bitcoin (~$150k), then travelled there for a holiday. Leave the US with the US passport and arrive in Van with the Van passport. CHange their name in Vanuatu, then move to a 3rd country to settle permanently with a new name. Maybe change it one more time and gain citizenship in that third country, and that'd be enough to disappear for regular people.
The spooks will still find you, but without extradition powers...
...they'll wait until you get drunk (i.e. roofied) at a bar, then kidnap and torture you until you give them all your money. The "red" budget is even more fun than the black budget. Choosing to defy the state is choosing to defend oneself forever against the creepy-crawlies the state pays to notice such defiance.
