VPNs didn’t make things untraceable at all. That’s not what they are for. They are just a method for encrypting traffic between two networks that have connectivity to the public Internet. Traffic from your machine to the VPN entrypoint gets routed just like any other network traffic. A relatively passive MitM can readily see where packets are going to/arriving from based upon the headers.
I’m using a VPN. How would that work?
VPNs didn’t make things untraceable at all. That’s not what they are for. They are just a method for encrypting traffic between two networks that have connectivity to the public Internet. Traffic from your machine to the VPN entrypoint gets routed just like any other network traffic. A relatively passive MitM can readily see where packets are going to/arriving from based upon the headers.