You're a cop in Calgary, someone calls you that their bank account has been emptied because they accidentally signed into their bank account through a phishing site.
You look at the email, trace the site to an IP address in China.
After months of work somehow you manage to get someone in China to care enough to give you details for that IP, it was to a shared hosting account that was closed down 24 hours after registering because it used a stolen credit card from Russia and the IP address of the person that registered the account traces back to Brazil.
Now what?
Spam senders do an enormous amount of work to hide behind a long chain of false information.
That said, they do a lot of work to try and shut them down too.
It's more like the wild west with marshals and outlaw gangs though.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-18898971