This is incredibly awful and inaccurate advice. 1. The client you use doesn't matter a bit. 2. Encrypting the traffic helps if an ISP is actively looking for

This is incredibly awful and inaccurate advice. 1. The client you use doesn't matter a bit. 2. Encrypting the traffic helps if an ISP is actively looking for torrenting, but they rarely do this. In fact, I suspect residential ISPs (Time Warner, Verizon, Comcast) absolutely never do this; university and corporate network administrators might. In part because it's very time and effort consuming for them, but mostly because lots of people torrent perfectly legal things. People get caught because the MPAA, and other organizations, contract firms to write scripts and bots to crawl sites and hunt for as many trackers as possible, then monitor trackers and record all peers observed if they find a file that matches content they own. Encryption won't do anything there. You can't encrypt your IP address from a peer, obviously. 3. When you do it makes little difference. Your odds of getting caught may be a little higher in the first few days, but many people still get caught several years later. The cost of keeping these scripts on these trackers is merely the cost of a little bandwidth and electricity for them. They have no reason not to sit on a tracker forever. 4. You have it completely backwards. It's the "mafiaa" who send the logs of what they found to your ISP. Then your ISP notifies you of the report they received. They don't require any info from the ISP (unless they decide to later file a lawsuit and want the subscriber's personal information). The burden of proof is on them to give what they have to your ISP. I've dealt with many of these cases from the perspective of the ISP. None of these are secrets. Using a VPN to do something illegal is not remotely "tinfoil hat". Just use a VPN or a tracker you're reasonably sure their bots can't find. That's it. It's easy. When you torrent, your goal is to hide from other peers of the torrent, not to hide from your ISP.