I’ve had certain aspects of myself released to the world, but as of yet, no theft of data per se, if we’re talking things like bank details and whatnot. The way I’ve always gone about things provides natural security benefits. There have been times where SWAT made a cameo, thrice actually. I was always wary of them but, though this is going to sound dark, I subconsciously still straddled such lines because of “mental health issues” (I put that in quotes because often people say that dismissively) and me thinking “what a way to test my luck”. Third time they came, they probably knew this because there was a difference in them.

Side note, with that said, I’ll use this opportunity to be the first to confirm that VPN’s don’t protect you from malice, they’re really there for foreigners accessing forbidden content, something I’ve always known, and NordVPN was recently caught empowering others to do what it itself promises not to. Any exchange of cookies is going to give you away, I remember using the DeviantArt forums long ago (I was banned from there without being banned from the whole site) and seeing people constantly ban evade with VPN’s and get banned because each time they ban evade they think they found “a suitable IP” even though a VPN is more akin to having a mailbox disguise than an invisibility cloak. You don’t know who is disguised as a mailbox, but you know enough to consider it strange when you see a mailbox wandering the streets on its own, and you know you can remove their disguise if you’re close enough to them. Most such thievery happens by the wannabe thief just being a detective about it.