Spectrism

Search sites are sketchy af

Jackett solves that issue

Ignore that orange banner, it’s an ad. In fact, ignore all banners telling you something like “Your IP is exposed”, because those are all just trying to sell you a VPN and can’t possibly know for certain if an address belongs to a VPN server or not. Always compare IP addresses manually.

What’s important in this case is the address listed in the table below after you have opened the magnet link in your torrent client. If everything works correctly, it should be different from your actual IP address (which may or may not be the one displayed on the site, depending on whether you’re using split tunneling).

Same thing also happened to me at the end of last year. I usually only use torrents on my PC, but that day I decided to also use them on my laptop and of course I forgot to change the network interface to that of my VPN in qBittorrent because I’m an idiot. After around 2 weeks, I got a cease and desist letter ordering me to pay ~1000 € and sign their cease and desist declaration. Was able to negotiate down to 600 € and only sent back a modified declaration, still pretty expensive for such a silly little mistake. I’d say you can consider yourself lucky to just receive a warning :)

Unfortunately for me, German law makes torrents a very lucrative business model for some law firms who do nothing but send cease and desist letters, thousands each year.

I only got caught for a few seconds according to their letter, but that was enough to get me into trouble. Not sure what the reason was, perhaps I started the VPN too late or maybe systemd was stopping the VPN service before qBt got closed when I was shutting the laptop down. Either way, this probably wouldn’t have happened if I had set the correct network interface in qBt and I’ve learnt to always do that first whenever I install a torrent client. I can only advise everyone to also check the publicly visible torrent IP with tools like this, just to be sure.

Smooth sailin’ me hearties! 🏴‍☠️