How an internet mapping glitch kept leading the FBI to a tiny farm in Kansas
This is how an internet mapping glitch turned into countless FBI visits to a tiny farm in Kansas.
The mystery dates back to 2011 when a couple moved into a farm in a quiet town.
But things began to get strange just a few days after they moved in, when the police arrived looking for a stolen truck.
Afterwards, the police continued to turn up, looking for other stolen items.
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Uploading a video on the story to YouTube, @halfasinteresting, explained the details, adding that FBI agents would arrive at the farm “looking for runaway children”.
The video continued: “The IRS sent agents claiming the Arnolds had committed tax fraud. Ambulances, searching for suicidal veterans would barge onto the property at night, waking them up.
“They got threatening phone calls from people who claimed the Arnolds had scammed them out of money or stolen their credit cards.
“Sometimes they’d find total strangers angrily searching through their barn, and one time they found a broken toilet on their driveway, seemingly put there either as a bizarre, confusing threat, or a bizarre, confusing gift.”
But why were these unexplained things happening?
The answer lies in a mapping glitch for searching a person’s IP address.
The company MaxMind provides a geolocation for IP addresses, meaning pinpointing where an individual’s device is located.
However, it isn’t always able to give an accurate or specific reading. In fact, sometimes it only knows that the device is somewhere in the US.
Despite this, it will still give coordinates and in the case where it only knows that the IP address is in America, it’ll give the coordinates of the center of the country.
So what is in the exact center of the US? You probably guessed it - the Arnolds’ tiny Kansas farm.
In the video, @halfasinteresting said: “Normally, what you should do in a situation like this is make sure those coordinates are in the middle of a lake or something, so that it’s clear to people you aren’t actually trying to provide them with an actual, exact location.
“But MaxMind, being a poor, naive, multi-million dollar tech company, didn’t think of that.
“And you’ll never guess what just so happened to be on the exact coordinates of 38 degree north, 97 degrees west: the Arnolds’ farm.
“It turned out that there were over 600 million IP addresses that MaxMind showed as coming from the Arnolds’ home.”
After realizing what was happening, the couple sued the company, who quickly moved the default location to the middle of a lake.
Taking to the YouTube comment section, one user wrote: “Ironically, this glitch would also have allowed MaxMind to accurately determine the source location of a lawsuit against them.”
A second said: “Just imagine building an evil mansion in that location, it would be so funny.”
And a third joked: “Perfect cover! Now they can do all of this stuff without raising any suspicion - they would just say that it is a bug.”