Family sues over ‘digital hell’ of IP address glitch

A Kansas family whose remote farm was visited "countless times" by police trying to find missing people, hackers, identity fraudsters and stolen cars because of a glitch is suing the digital mapping company responsible.

James and Theresa Arnold filed a complaint against MaxMind on Friday in the US district court in Kansas.

MaxMind, based in Massachusetts, allows companies to find out the location of the computers used by individuals to access their websites.

According to the complaint, the husband and wife team dealt with five years of “digital hell” after moving into the property in Butler County, Kansas, in 2011.

The couple had been drawn to the farm because it was close to the nursing home where Theresa’s mother was being cared for and the school that their two sons attended.

The landlord also allowed the sons to hunt and fish on the surrounding 620 acres of land.

The first week after they moved in, two deputies from the Butler County sheriff’s department came to their house looking for a stolen truck, something that would happen again and again over the subsequent years.

“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,” the complaint said.

At one point, James Arnold was reported for holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making child abuse films.

For half a decade, the family was mystified about why this was happening, until April this year, when an article in Fusion revealed the truth.

It all came down to a glitch in the MaxMind’s IP address mapping database.

IP addresses

IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique identifiers associated with computers or networks of computers connected to the internet.

Through its GeoIP product, MaxMind matches IP addresses with their assumed geographic location, and sells that information to companies so they can use it to show targeted advertising or send someone a cease and desist letter if they are illegally downloading films.

IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify an IP’s true location.

That address just happened to be the Arnolds’s property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America.

More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm, with more than 5,000 companies drawing information from MaxMind’s database.

It wasn’t just police who turned up on the Arnolds’s doorstep.

Angry business owners would turn up claiming someone at the residence was sending their business thousands of emails and clogging their computer systems.

Other people became convinced that someone living at the residence was responsible for internet scams.

Background check

In 2013, the Butler County sheriff’s department ran a background check on the family because of all of the suspicious activity that seemed to be taking place at the property.

Police told the Arnolds that that there was a LDNS (local domain name server) on their property and that the sheriff's department received "weekly reports about fraud, scams, stolen Facebook accounts, missing person reports, suicide threats from the Veteran's Association".

However, there was no such server on the property, the Arnolds said; it was all down to MaxMind’s mapping error.

The glitch had been in effect since 2002 and, as explained in Fusion’s article, had affected the property’s previous tenants as well.

“As a result of the defendant’s reckless and grossly negligent conduct, the plaintiffs have sustained great emotional distress, fear for their safety and humiliation,” said the complaint.

The Arnolds are seeking damages in excess of $75,000 (about €67,000).

“My clients have been through digital hell. The most vile accusations have been made against them - such as that they’ve been involved in child pornography.

"What impact would it have on your life if someone accused you of being in child pornography? Obviously it's horrendous," said the Arnolds's attorney Randall Rathbun, who said that the police visits continued "up until last month".

MaxMind has since changed its default location, Mr Rathbun said, but “there’s been no indication on our end that things have changed”.

The company said it was aware of the lawsuit but does not comment on pending litigation.

Guardian service