Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

I apologize in advance because I'm sure these probably feel like some stupid and duplicate questions. However, my attempts to find answers to these online have been met with answers that are sparse, oftentimes old (8+ years), and conflicting. I am looking into getting a seedbox. I decided to go with Whatbox because they seem to consistently have the best reputation. But I have some questions regarding the safety of doing this.

• Whatbox (and a few other seedbox companies) offer seedboxes in the US. How can they do that without being immediately shut down? Do they have some kind of restrictions that could cause problems with using a US-hosted seedbox? I've read that there is much faster torrent connection with EU-hosted boxes, but is that worth the tradeoff for direct download speeds? (According to Whatbox's network test, I'd be at 20 MB/s for USA and 10 MB/s for Netherlands.)

• How safe is paying via your real payment details? Pretty much every seedbox seems to take crypto, which sounds a lot safer but tacks on processing fees and inconvenience. (Also I am morally opposed to crypto so I would prefer not to use it.) This is the question that really seemed to have conflicting answers when I looked.

• How safe is connecting via your real IP, or should you still connect to the seedbox via VPN? I know that you won't get dinged by your ISP, I mean in case of something like the host being taken down and their records being looked through.