An IP Address Mapping Error That Puts a Farm on the Map for All the Wrong Reasons

Just an hour’s drive from Wichita, Kansas, in the little town of Potwin, there’s a 360-acre farm with a very big problem. This isn’t your average “someone broke the fence and the cows are loose” kind of problem. This is a plot twist straight out of a digital horror novel, with a quaint family farm as its unlucky protagonist.

The same family has owned this land for over a hundred years. It’s the kind of quiet, remote place you’d expect to find in every nostalgic country song ever written: a farm, a pasture, an old orchard, two barns, some hog shacks, and a two-story house. The nearest neighbor? A mile away. The closest “big” town? Population: 13,000. To say this is real rural America would be an understatement, especially since it’s only a couple of hours from the literal geographic center of the United States.

It’s the last place you would expect to find criminal activity. It’s certainly not the place where you would expect several criminals to gather. What if we told you that the FBI, IRS, and other government agencies have targeted the farm as the headquarters for some of the most nefarious bad guys in the country? All of them are right there, sipping lemonade under a beautiful Kansas sky.

Because of an IP address mapping error (don’t worry… we’ll explain what that means), the renters of the farm have been living in what can only be described as a technological nightmare.

Welcome to the Crime Scene That Isn’t

In 2011, James and Theresa Arnold made the quintessential “let’s get away from it all” move to the farm. They were looking for the kind of place where the phrase “peace and quiet” was invented—a small town where even the cows were probably bored.

Just days after they settled in, two sheriff’s deputies came knocking, looking for a stolen truck. The Arnolds, being reasonably certain they hadn’t been playing a real life version of Grand Theft Auto, chalked it up to a mistake. After all, mistakes happen. So what if someone slipped up and mistook them for criminal miscreants. What are the odds that such a thing will ever happen again? It’s not like the government has ever — oh, launched a missile at Mexico by mistake, just to pick a random, hypothetical example.

Oh, if they only knew! It wasn’t long before they were practically hosting a law enforcement convention. Cops returned, this time searching for various other stolen items. After that, it was the FBI. They were hunting for runaway children. The IRS jumped in, accusing the Arnolds of tax fraud. If all of that wasn’t enough, ambulances started arriving in the middle of the night, searching for suicidal veterans.

If you think this sounds like a dark spin-off of a Bill Murray movie, bureaucratic nightmare, buckle up; it gets weirder. They started getting threatening phone calls accusing them of scams. Strangers showed up, rifling through their barn. Even the internet’s doxxing vigilantes have joined the fray, posting the names and addresses of innocent renters online. In one particularly surreal moment, a broken toilet mysteriously appeared on their driveway. A threat? A gift? Who knows.

What was going on? Why were the Arnolds suddenly the stars of a real-life crime thriller? Was their farm built on cursed land? Had they upset a powerful toilet-wielding enemy?

MaxMind Mapping — Pointing To the “There” in Cyberspace

To solve this mystery, we need to meet MaxMind. This sounds like a great name for a super villain with a high IQ or a tutoring company to help kids with their homework. In reality, it specializes in geolocating IP addresses. Over 5,000 companies, along with a Who’s Who of government agencies, rely on MaxMind to track where people are, based solely on their IP addresses.

Here’s how it works: every device connected to the internet has a unique identifier called an IP address. While an IP address is great for telling devices where to send that very important email, it’s not particularly helpful in figuring out where that device physically is. This is where companies like MaxMind come in. They take IP addresses and try to map them to actual locations using a variety of methods, ranging from high-tech GPS data from smartphones to the significantly sketchier “war driving” (which involves driving around and scooping up IP addresses from open Wi-Fi networks like some kind of nerdy scavenger hunt).

However — and this is a big however — IP mapping is not an exact science. Sometimes they can pinpoint an IP address down to a specific house. Other times, they can only narrow it down to, say, “somewhere in the U.S.” And when that happens, MaxMind’s solution is to assign the coordinates for the center of the country.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is where things went terribly wrong.

Welcome to 38°N, 97°W: Population, You

The geographical center of the contiguous U.S. is somewhere in northern Kansas. OK, “somewhere” is a bit vague. If you want specifics, you can find it at 39°50′N 98°35′W. This will bring to you about 2.6 miles (4.2 km) northwest of the center of Lebanon, Kansas, approximately 12 miles (19 km) south of the Kansas/Nebraska border.

MaxMind, not wanting to mess around with troublesome things like decimals, so it uses the nice, whole numbers of 38°N, 97°W, which is 152.5 miles (245.5 km) away and happens to be — wait for it — smack in the middle of the Arnold farm.

Every time someone tries to trace a scammer, fraudster, or identity thief to an unknown location in the U.S., MaxMind’s database points them straight to the Arnold farm. Since 5,000 companies use MaxMind’s services, that happens a lot. By “a lot,” we mean over 600 million times.

MaxMind’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad IP Address Mapping Consequences

As it turns out, for years, every time MaxMind couldn’t identify the exact location of an IP address, it sent people to the Arnold farm. FBI agents, Google sleuths, and irate customers all descended on the quiet Kansas home, convinced they had found their criminal mastermind. But the truth was far stranger: MaxMind had simply decided to mark the center of the U.S. with coordinates that just happened to land on the unassuming farm.

Eventually, the local sheriff had to get involved. He even posted a sign at the end of the driveway telling people to back off and to call him with any questions. His department’s job, it seems, became protecting the Arnold farm from other law enforcement agencies who didn’t get the memo.

MaxMind Finally Takes Action (Sort of)

When MaxMind was contacted about the debacle, it admitted that it hadn’t considered the consequences of its decision. In other words, it never occurred to them that when they did their geolocation magic and pointed to a specific place in Kansas that anyone would ever think, “Hey, this is where all these things are happening!”

To MaxMind’s credit, they’re now working on fixing the problem. They’ve decided to move the default location to a lake, which, as far as we know, does not have any unsuspecting families living on it. But here’s the catch: not all companies update their databases regularly. So, for now, the Arnold farm is still on the map — and not in a good way.

A Digital Time Bomb

The Arnold farm isn’t the only place to suffer from misdirected geolocation from faulty IP mapping. All over the country, people are dealing with the consequences of living at the internet’s favorite default locations. One man in Virginia had his home raided because 17 million IP addresses were associated with his house. And let’s not even get started on the poor souls who keep getting strangers showing up at their door looking for lost smartphones.

The moral of the story? The internet is a wild and unregulated frontier. If you think your neighbor is a high-powered mastermind of an international crime syndicate, you might want to double-check before depositing a broken toilet in his driveway. It’s possible he’s just living on MaxMind’s map.

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