Does Torguard block torrents in the usa?

In March of 2022, TorGuard made a blog post outlining the result of a legal battle that they had with various companies. A simple explanation of the issue would seemingly be that TorGuard was requested to give away logs but refused to do so. The blog post itself doesn’t opine on any issues related to the case specifically, but the underlying factor thus being that TorGuard settled with the court by taking measures to block BitTorrent traffic on USA servers.

One might come to the conclusion after reading this blog post that TorGuard refused to give up logs on their users—which is an amazing precedent for a VPN.

In fact, there are only a few examples of VPNs going to court and refusing to give up logs. One such example is oVPN, a company that refused to give up logs and won a court case in 2020. However oVPN’s stalwart defense and trustworthiness has recently gone down the drain due to a recent Pango acquisition (Pango being a company that owns VPNs such as Hotspot Shield that have less than a stellar reputation.)

Why do Websites Say TorGuard Does Not Work for Torrenting?

Since TorGuard’s blog post, lots of websites have clamored to use this precedent as a way to encourage users to steer clear from TorGuard, explaining how other VPNs are better for torrenting. Despite the fact that no VPN is allowed to encourage users to download copyright protected material or break the laws in the EU or USA.

Several of these websites have for a long time had a huge hate boner for TorGuard and other USA based companies—claiming that being inside the United States is somehow a downside for users despite the fact that most VPN companies who are not based in the USA have offices there and are beholden to the same laws.

Once such website, RestorePrivacy, is probably the most well known source of this issue. I’ve seen lots of people mention this article on Reddit, slickdeals, and even in my own comments.

In my humble opinion, the website was clear they intend to dissuade anyone from using TorGuard VPN by mentinoning the court issue on any page that mentions TorGuard, while promoting other VPNs for torrenting despite the fact NordVPN is liable to the same laws as TorGuard is.

To say this is a biased take is putting it mildly. Restoreprivacy has for a long time had a hate boner the size of jupiter’s cock for any VPN that is not using a offshore VPN location such as a random lawyer office in Panama.

Why does RestorePrivacy Hate USA Based VPNs?

Claim#1 is that your VPN could be shut down at any moment due to copyright holder pressure. Restoreprivacy uses LiquidVPN getting sued as an example—which is not a good example.

No one knew who LiquidVPN was before the issue in the first place—which could be one reason they were targeted. Is this really the best case to bring up? If I was a lawyer, instead of going after VPNs that are valued around a billion dollars, I would go after companies that cannot afford to spend millions on legal defense, and most likely could only file as bankruptcy as their defense. Then after you win that case, go after bigger VPNs. Not only that, but LiquidVPN now redirects to FastVPN.com—which is definitely odd.

TorGuard, another USA based VPN, has proved this “risk” wrong since it’s based in the USA and still functioning today.

Claim #2 is that your torrenting could be restricted, but again is proven false since users can still use TorGuard to torrent.

Claim#3 is that somehow USA based VPNs have less legal protection than other VPNs. Restoreprivacy uses IPVanish as a legal precedent—in which they gave away logs to Homeland Security because a user was using the VPN to distribute or host child porn.

Not sure why that is valid. You shouldn’t be doing ANYTHING criminal on a VPN in the first place on any VPN, and if you’re a pedo, you should be in jail. Using a non USA based VPN to host child porn is NOT safe, and is agaisnt the TOS of every single VPN provider.

And Claim #4 is that as a VPN user, you could become target of a lawsuit, but the website does not provide any sources for that ever happening, so its mostly just conjecture.

I reached out to Sven Taylor, the owner of this website, to inform him that users were reporting success using TorGuard to torrent without restrictions.

The gist of that conversation was him becoming extremely hostile with me ( I won’t share the emails to respect his privacy)—asking me why I cared in the first place—and after many long emails of me explaining to him the article should be accurate to potential people who want to use TorGuard, he VERY begrudgingly updated the article with a small update.

As a footnote, he has still not removed other instances on the website telling people not to use TorGuard due to this now nonexistent issue, such as in his NordVPN vs TorGuard comparison.

So outside of RestorePrivacy going out of their way to tell people not to use TorGuard for torrenting and getting lots of hits in the google search engine for that term—at the end of the day, what is the truth? Does TorGuard work well for torrenting or not?

Well, here is a sample video I made on 7/16/2023 to illustrate my findings, down below.

TL DR;

-TorGuard does work for torrenting in the USA as of 2023.

-TorGuard is one of the few VPNs that has gone to court and proven they do not collect logs.

-Websites telling you not to use TorGuard because it does not work with torrenting are misinformed, and possibly biased because they want to promote other VPNs they like more