The Taylor-Vogelman family, owners of the Vogelman Farm just outside of Wichita, Kansas, have been the victims of internet harassment for well over a decade. They have had their homes assaulted and damaged, received very insidious threats both by mail and through digital media, been raided by the FBI and federal marshals, visited by the IRS, and a large number of additional emergency services responding to suicide threats, child abuse and endangerment, runaway children, identity theft and credit fraud.
The owner, Joyce Vogelman, is actually described by locals as a very kind, ordinary person who is neither a criminal, fraud, tax evader, nor suicidal. So why is this woman cursed by all of this grief?
Many people who dabble in information technology, even a little bit, understand that IP addresses are the designated address that assign where and how data travels across local networks and the greater internet. Those who know it a little bit better, or at least think they do, understand that IP addresses are sometimes statically assigned to geographical locations. In reality, this is not completely true, as IP addresses are often dynamically changing and being reassigned regularly to different residences, small businesses, and the various devices spanning the Internet of Things.
One company, MaxMind, made an effort to make this system a little bit more concrete and recordable by creating a massive database of IP addresses that were logged according to their relative geographical locations. However, it is often not stressed enough that establishing links between IP address and their geographical locations is NOT an exact science! For one family in the heart of Kansas, this truth, combined with the lack of technical understanding of very angry internet users, sent them spiraling into a nightmare of digital torment.
The company MaxMind, which is one of the largest entities in the greater internet infrastructure, assumed the responsibility of documenting and logging every IP address that gets pinged by the internet, and assigning it a geographical location to the greatest degree of accuracy as possible. Despite their best attempts at precision, The TCP/IP stack is still very liquid, and always being changed. MaxMind has assembled its database by way of what is essentially the equivalent of War-driving, a technique of driving past wireless access points and capturing wireless handshakes. Except, instead of authentication handshakes, MaxMind is capturing and recording Public IP addresses. Google Maps operates much the same way in how it records its street-side views of the geographical Earth, driving by in vans with cameras mounted at every angle (as if that's not the creepiest thing for a global IT giant to be doing).
As you can imagine, that is a LOT of IP addresses to cover. In fact, with IPv4 alone, there are over 4 billion IP addresses available. With IPv6 now in active use, that number has astronomically risen to 340 undecillion possible addresses (that's 340 followed by 36 zeros). As such, it is painfully obvious that there is no way even if MaxMind had an army of super-spy vans to ping all of the world's IP addresses, to record all of them, seeing as they are dynamic and constantly changing. Even after ten years, MaxMind still has over 600 million undocumented IP addresses that exist within the United States.
Why does this matter? Well, MaxMind's database doesn't know the specific geographical location of an IP address within a given country, it simply points the inquiry to the exact geographical center of that country. In the United States, according to MaxMind's database, that geographical center happens to be 38N Latitude, 98W Longitude. Where is that? You guessed it, right on top of the Taylor Vogelman farm, which is just under two hours away from the actual geographical center of the United States (39.833333N, 98.585522W).
Because of this convenient rounding function, every time MaxMind's database has been used to find the geographical location of an IP address that has not had its exact latitude and longitude recorded, it returns the exact geographical location of the Vogelman farm. Uh Oh...
Thanks to MaxMind, local law enforcement in the area around the Vogelman's farm has largely had its job changed from protecting the peace to protecting the Taylors' home.
It has been discovered now, after 14 years of hell, that MaxMind's geographical assignment of undocumented IPs within the United States has been pointing law enforcement, federal agencies, hackers, angry internet users, stalkers, frauds, and who knows what else to the Vogelman farm. MaxMind, after becoming aware of the issue, is scrambling to find a solution to the problem. Unfortunately, this is not the only known case. Similar stories have occurred in the UK, France, and Germany, where innocent people are being harassed because of defaulted database assignments that throw their hands up in the air when asked something it doesn't know, and points the requester to whatever the developers felt like assigning at the time. By far, the Vogelman's farm boasts the largest attention, having over 600 million IP addresses assigned to its geographical location, and holding a very high pedestal on the top searched locations on Google for the last decade.
As a private investigator, I have incidentally used the MaxMind database as well, knowingly or not, to search for geographical locations based on IP addresses and known information of my suspects. However, it should be understood that just because Google tells you something does not automatically make it true, and as stated earlier, matching IP addresses to a physical location is never 100% accurate. In most cases, it's almost completely wrong, pointing you to a city or state hundreds of miles away from the actual physical location of an IP address.
Let it be understood by all the wanna-be digital forensics investigators and vengeful fraud victims out there that you should not go harassing people based on a default google maps address. For the Taylors' sakes, how about we leave these sorts of things to the legal system and professional investigators that know what they are doing?
Just a thought...
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