This is easily avoided by using a popular open source BitTorrent client, the most popular one being qBittorrent. Lol yeah qbittorrent is known to exploit your device for crypto mining. They also bought utorrent, which is also used for that. A safe download client is Deluge. I had believed torrents are quite secure since the connection is encrypted and it uses hashing to verify what you downloaded matches the .torrent file. The encryption is very poor. As soon as you download a movie with a torrent the German government will send you a letter stating the movie you downloaded, with the exact date and time, and a hefty fine. The encryption is old and simple. Do Usenet groups or indexers have a community surrounding them? Yeah, there are many tracker sites with a vast community and there are applications which function as indexers which have a large community too. There are comments under almost every post.