But the accounts 1 and 2 on VCE 4 (the ones funded by Monero) weren't registered in either Morgan's or Lichtenstein's name. They were created with fake credentials.
The feds were able to link them to the couple because bitcoins were moved from VCE 4 to other accounts that also had received bitcoins which were traceable to their alphabay accounts.
If they had funneled everything through monero I can't say that they wouldn't have got caught like this.
No the moment after they moved to monero it should've been untraceable. The discrepancy you are seeing is that the USG definitely has tools to trace any of these "anonymous" coins. It's highly likely that these are honeypots.
Nobody knows who Satoshi was, everybody just assumes he isn't the feds themselves. Such scenario would be so catastrophic to organizations that rely on its advertised anonymity and it would be the best investment ever since you could just keep denying you have this capability, always coming up with a cover story (keys in cloud, we traced their keys, they were dumb etc).
This would keep criminals guessing, the economic value of laundering with crypto is too great to give it up but at the end of the day, they can only operate under uncertainty.
The feds were able to link them to the couple because bitcoins were moved from VCE 4 to other accounts that also had received bitcoins which were traceable to their alphabay accounts.
If they had funneled everything through monero I can't say that they wouldn't have got caught like this.