The 623-acre property in Potwin, an hour’s drive from Wichita, the largest city in Kansas, became the “digital centre” of the United States for IP address mapping company Max Mind after it assigned unknown IP addresses to a longitude and latitude which matched the farm’s front yard.
More than 620 million IP addresses were assigned to the 100-year-old farm for a decade, leading to a number of strange knocks on the door.
They’ve been accused of all sorts of thuggery — identity theft, tax fraud, email and website hacking, property crimes, cyber crimes and harassment. Their names have been posted by online vigilantes and someone once left a used toilet in the driveway as an “indefinite threat”.
“The plaintiffs were repeatedly awakened from their sleep or disturbed from their daily activities by local, state or federal officials looking for a runaway child or a missing person, or evidence of a computer fraud, or call of an attempted suicide,” a lawsuit filed by the Arnolds reads.
“Law enforcement officials came to the residence all hours of the day or night.
“Threats began to be made against the [Arnolds] by individuals who were convinced that the perpetrator of internet scamming lived at the residence. State investigators — convinced that the [Arnolds] had been involved in an identity theft — came to the residence to take pictures of assets.”
“The plaintiffs were repeatedly awakened from their sleep or disturbed from their daily activities by local, state or federal officials looking for a runaway child or a missing person, or evidence of a computer fraud, or call of an attempted suicide,” a lawsuit filed by the Arnolds reads.
“Law enforcement officials came to the residence all hours of the day or night.
“Threats began to be made against the [Arnolds] by individuals who were convinced that the perpetrator of internet scamming lived at the residence. State investigators — convinced that the [Arnolds] had been involved in an identity theft — came to the residence to take pictures of assets.”
In one case a Boston company, who had just been the victim of internet crime, used MaxMind’s IP locator and came angrily knocking on the Arnold’s door looking for an explanation as to why they infected their email system with a virus.
