The glitch had been in effect since 2002 and, as explained in Fusion’s article, had affected the property’s previous tenants as well. There was no such server on the property, say the Arnolds it was all down to MaxMind’s mapping error. 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 Veterans Association”. 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. Other people became convinced that someone living at the residence was responsible for internet scams. Angry business owners would turn up claiming someone at the residence was sending their business thousands of emails and clogging their computer systems. It wasn’t just police who turned up on the Arnolds’ doorstep. More than 600 million IP addresses are associated with their farm and more than 5,000 companies are drawing information from MaxMind’s database. That address just happened to be the Arnolds’ property, a remote farm that is located slap-bang in the middle of America. IP mapping isn’t an exact science and so MaxMind assigns a default address when it can’t identify its true location. 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, for example, show targeted advertising or send someone a cease and desist letter if they are illegally downloading films. IP, or Internet Protocol, addresses are unique identifiers associated with computers or networks of computers connected to the internet. It all came down to glitch in the MaxMind’s IP address mapping database. At one point, James Arnold was reported for holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making child abuse films.įor half a decade the family was mystified about why this was happening until April this year when Fusion’s Kashmir Hill revealed the truth. “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. 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.