In the US, virtually no one has been legally prosecuted for consumer level piracy since around 2010. The only exception is a small group of copyright trolls that focus on porn videos. The government was never the one doing it; if the government raided your house and found evidence that you illegally torrented .mkv files, they wouldn’t care or do anything with that information.

That said you should still use a VPN, because industry groups are now completely focused on getting ISPs to send intimidating letters to people and eventually shutting off their internet, rather than prosecuting individuals in court, and they do that by discovering people’s IP addresses by monitoring torrents. If you use a VPN and bind your torrent client to it, you are entirely safe from all consequences that actually happen.