A VPN could be another thing, but of course it will change your real location which will be hard for the authorities to find you if you are laudering money. That makes sense then...
This would totally depend on your VPN provider.
Who knows, one or two requests from authorities could be enough for some providers to succumb and handover whatever data they have and/or start the surveillance. Personally, I've never thought VPNs could make people anonymous, after all, we are just shifting the trust from our ISP to our VPN provider. For instance, almost all of them claims they don't store logs but we can't verify this as a user so there is a lot of trust involved.
That's true, sometimes I've been thinking why others requiring subscription while some are not instead they are giving it for free, does this mean the free giving is much more risky than the
other one who has a subscriptions?
Most I've seen are in a freemium model where plans are divided between paid and free-- free plans are typically with some limits imposed e.g. speed, countries, etc. In this case, I could see it as a promotional approach. Of course, I'm not saying every provider with freemium model must be clean lol since you still have to consider their overall reputation.
A completely free provider though would send me alarm signals in a heartbeat as you're likely the product that is why it's free.