From the article, USDT was not the means of laundering the money it was just the payment option they chose, perhaps because they thought it will make the job easier. They tried to use shell companies to clean the money from drugs and then transfer that using crypto, surprising considering the individual involved, but not surprising for some reasons.
Your advice holds good. Crypto doesn't offer a traceless route to hide illegal funds.
They choose the wrong one, it is an example of using what you don't understand, many people still thinks wrongly about how crypto works, it is very complex, if you are not ready to learn you won't know what you ate getting into.
This reminds me of a stranger you wanted to sell USDt to me on telegram at a lesser amount, he said I could buy one USDT for $0.90 each, any greedy bastard would have fallen for this, he does show me some proof of past transactions he did with people.
He is legit in terms of selling those USDT but where the USDT came from is what I was curious about, so I decided to scare him, I said I knew this USDT was stolen, it is stolen fund and what you don't know is that there is a tracker in on every USDt addresses, you are been watched right now.
If I was wrong he wouldn't even care, but instead, he started asking me questions about how he could be tracked, this was how I knew that the Usdt was not clean.
The lesson of the day
Stop being greedy, when something is too good to be true then something is wrong, always be curious about everything, especially good offers online.