Your wording implies you're already aware of this, but I'll say it anyways:
Survivor Bias.
The criminals that do all of the obvious smart things are much less likely to get arrested. The ones that do get arrested, are disproportionately the ones that did something not-smart. The the larger the quantity and (not-)quality of their mis-steps, the more likely they are to be the one you read about for being arrested.
Living in SF seems like a fairly reasonable mistake--it's simple confidence that you won't be caught.
Criminals face the same sort of issue DRM makers do: they only need to make one big mistake.
Some of their mistakes may go unnoticed for a long period of time, but in the long run, just one mistake is all it takes for everything to come undone.
The ones that aren't caught are almost certainly not perfect criminals, either, they're just lucky criminals whose errors happen to have intersected with the gaps in imperfect law enforcement.