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! 🏴☠️
Jackett solves that issue