Please stop being naïve about your online activities, whatever they maybe.
1) I grant you your premise of attempting to hiding one's true IP through a VPN is a possibility, although everything on the internet is traceable if you throw enough resources at it, just think of Kevin Mitnick or Dread Pirate Roberts. Ask any poster if they would like to go through the hassle and expense of having to litigate the matter up to the point where such questions of if your credentials were stolen or not would even come up. By that point you would be, if I wanted to be extremely optimistic, somewhere between $5-10k in the hole in attorney’s fees not to mention the other impacts it could have on your life.
2) The statute of limitations for most crimes in the US is 5 years. So in theory, if a copyright holder objects to anything you have posted within that period, they could subpoena your Usenet provider and obtain your info from your billing information.
It has been my experience that the majority of the major posters on Usenet (not the ones in this dinky cooking group but in the main piracy groups) have a monetary incentive to do so. How many people would actually pay for a premium provider if they were not getting something for their money? It would simply not be profitable to run a premium service on the subscription fees of those people not downloading premium content. It would be logical to assume that those individuals who are willing to expose themselves to the liability are closely associated with the owners of the premium providers, and here I am being kind as they are one and the same.
That said, there are several techniques that prolific posters use to try to hide their identity from the powers that be with various levels of success.
1) You could get a shell account on either a compromised server or anonymous provider (paid for in cash or prepaid credit card that is paid for by cash) and then running a program to upload your posts to a Usenet provider, paid for just as above. You will need some minor Linux programming skills or know someone that does. You can get folks to help you do all of these things if you hang around the EFNET IRC channels which are occupied by copyright infringers, which is pretty much all of them, long enough.
2) Buy a one time data block from a provider such as Astraweb or Altopia or any other provider that offers such a service and again pay for it as above, and only logon to that account to post through a properly configured and managed VPN, that is owned by an offshore company.
Whatever method you choose to hide your personal info, just keep in mind my previous statement about one’s traceability and the fact that you only need to make a single mistake and you are exposed to liability for 5 years.
Just my two cents.
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