Permanently Deleted
really shady shit is next to impossible to hide against determined state actors. the pirate bay people were on a hitlist for a good while and one of them slipped up despite having literal tin foil / heat resistant plating on their homes to cover heat signatures of servers, faraday cages, no cell phones, and a billion redundancies. its more a matter of time.
cant remember explicitly what he said got him caught but for one of them (cant recall name) i remember him talking about the extreme paranoia of being hunted down by numerous conglomerates, how the officials in sweden were tugged and bullied by the USA, and the mistake of leaving asylum in laos for a literal holiday in cambodia that got him straight up kidnapped by headhunters
so dont create a cult of evildoer subversives if you dont like the look of prisons in your country. now if youre in russia or china youll be fine since they love it when people fuck with western economies. just make sure not to do anything anti-russian or chinese there
edit: so state actors figured out the location of everyone somehow but the smoking gun evidence was that one of the guys forgot to encrypt a single hard drive
Or you could mail an envelope with cash to Mulvad - taking a more physical security approach
For downloading torrents and shit just get a normal VPN with a visa card. Not keeping download logs will likely be enough security for torrents and the like.
If you are doing truly shady shit realize that all VPN servers are being monitored for incoming IP addresses, so if you plan on using a VPN at your home ip address there is no way to stay anonymous. Cash-only VPNs are only useful if you are never going to use them at home.
Cash and crypto if you're super careful, neither are perfect and absolutely can be traced, especially since cash you're probably sending through the mail and crypto has its flaws. Cash straight from the ATM has numbers on it to trace, crypto from one of those shady liquor store ATMs can also be traced by wallet, phone number (if you used your own and not a burner or something) and camera. There's ways around both of these with a little imagination.
For ok that provides some line of defense (unless the 3rd party gets hacked directly) you can use any old third party payment thing like paypal or wepay or something, but that could be traced from there if you really got someone big mad. There's also prepaid cards but similar deal, since 9/11 or so you have to provide some form of id afaik.