When I release a torrent and start seeding, after an hour or two I see a swarm of chinese IPs. 10 to 20 IPs from China, some downloading at single digit KB/s or even bytes per second, but of most of them downloading nothing at all. They are all using Transmission client.
What is that?
Yeah, I get some of these weird peers every now and then when I'm seeding. I just shrug it off, and think nothing of it. The ones I get are from the same country (not China) and they come in large groups. If they stick around for too long, I usually ban the peer(s).
In the past when I saw this, they're usually within the same class C v4 IP range. Previous discussion on the topic elsewhere seemed to suggest some sort of automated downloader used by streamer sites hosted in the same range of some of those addresses.
Again, that was from awhile ago. The TF article is something more recent.