And it's not like solving a $1K ransom is a high priority case for LE, so you are partially right.
Like the saying goes, there is a lot of bike stealing because LE doesn't really care about stolen bikes.
If a municipality decided to take bike theft seriously, by paying increased OT or expanding the police department employment rolls, law enforcement would be all over it.
A similar problem exists for ransomware. Ransomware attacks are less frequent and more targeted, but drastically harder to investigate. We could spend many billions more to build an infosec investigative capability in state governments, and that would help, but we would rather spend those billions on other things.
Similarly, getting serious about tracking Bitcoin movements would probably involve a lot of new regulations around the use of Bitcoin, and somehow enforcing them worldwide.
I suppose the point was more that the police are likely to be very interested if you rip off one company for $50k, but it's harder to get them interested when you rip off $1k from 50 people spread around dozens of jurisdictions.
FWIW: Around here bike registration exists but is voluntary.
But if a municipality devotes even a small amount of resources -- an officer or two, full-time, I guess -- to prosecuting bike theft, that can raise the odds of getting caught for a single theft, I don't know, maybe three orders of magnitude -- from 10^-6 to 10^-3, let's say. Someone who steals hundreds of bikes a year is then looking at a real chance of getting caught for one of them.
What I've seen argued, and I seem to recall there's even experimental evidence to support this, is that that's enough to reduce the reward/risk ratio to the point where bike theft as a career, at least, is uneconomic. You might still get occasional opportunistic thefts -- leaving a bike unlocked would still not be recommended -- but the bulk of the problem would go away.
Coming back to the topic, the same principle probably applies here. You don't have to even try to solve all the ransomware crimes; you just have to solve enough of them, and come down hard enough on the perpetrators, to change the reward/risk calculation. That will probably be a lot harder to do, though, since they're unlikely to even be in the same country as the victims.
2 years in run the stats and see if there's been an effect.
Where I live, they hide beside hedges, or in blind spots, and ticket Soccer moms for California Stops at odd hours. Hours when no one is even out.
Oh, and let's not forget, the real work. Pulling over 200 vechicles on Friday, Saturday nights, and Sunday afternoons(we all get rip roaring drunk after the big game?); and look for that guy who's just over .08.
I don't know how to respond to the weird point about drunk driving. If you have any uncertainty at all about whether you might be close to the limit, just don't drive. No excuses.
If we could spend "many billions" to build this "infosec investigative capability," would it not be more efficient to implement at the federal level? Rather than training (and funding) N specialists at X different locations, why not train XN specialists at one single location?
Edit: Except for the obvious use case where you are using more than one compound in a row (e.g., high- and low-level).
Anyone want to write some Black ICE? :)
When they were using webmoney and western union no one cared to track that either. Cross border electronic crime has never had significant attention put at it, short of attacks on government systems.
Of course now that it's being done at scale that may change.