Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

So I've been grabbing a few shows I want to watch reruns of while playing Balatro that don't have good blu ray releases. My piracy is fairly limited these days so I don't bother with private trackers (do have a VPN though). In the past, I never really had an issue with grabbing a few one offs off the popular, maybe honeypot, sites like rarbg and 1337x.

But over the past month or so, I've noticed I have gotten a lot of shitty files. Skips here and there or garbled colors for a scene or two. At first I though it was just a bad file since re-downloading the torrent had the exact same problem.

But, on a whim, I did a recheck and had to download like 40% of a torrent. And then 20% the next time. Which made me assume my NAS was fucked or I was dealing with a lot of packet lsos (... I AM dealing with a lot of packet loss from my ISP). But when I redownloaded a "known bad" torrent I had the exact same corrupted file.

So am I just REALLY unlucky? Or is there an epidemic of shitty/malicious seeds on the public trackers these days?