Market surveillance is much better than most people realize. The accounts making money on a scam like this would be identified, filtered for anomalous activity, and the people at the other end investigated.
How would it be harder to launder? You bet on a Tesla stock drop. That's perfectly legal. Musk tweets some bad news, and says he was hacked, but that doesn't mean you hacked him.
I'd imagine picking a highly volatile stock with a lot of wallstreetbet bros in it, like TSLA, would serve to helpfully obfuscate your trades and their relationship to the hack.
