A dirty secret is that piracy is being abused by criminal organizations[1]. When people unknowingly access such sites to see contents for free, it generate ad revenue for those organizations, which can fund other crimes.

[1]: https://www.interpol.int/en/Crimes/Illicit-goods/Projects/Pr...

Are you talking about:

> The suspects subscribed to 40 Korean cable TV service accounts, re-broadcasting content to Indonesia and offering video-on-demand (VOD) services through customized TV boxes, applications, and web browsers.

Broadly speaking any organisation facilitating piracy is implicitly a criminal one. Piracy is a pretty large field though and the economics of say a streaming site are going to be very different from running a torrent tracker. The fact you can use a torrent tracker without even visiting the site (Radarr/Sonarr etc) tells me that running a tracker site, probably isn't very lucrative.