Oh, sweet merciful Jesus. Meet a family farm in Kansas with the weirdest serious problem you’ll likely see today:
For the last decade, Taylor and her renters have been visited by all kinds of mysterious trouble. They’ve been accused of being identity thieves, spammers, scammers and fraudsters. They’ve gotten visited by FBI agents, federal marshals, IRS collectors, ambulances searching for suicidal veterans, and police officers searching for runaway children. They’ve found people scrounging around in their barn. The renters have been doxxed, their names and addresses posted on the internet by vigilantes. Once, someone left a broken toilet in the driveway as a strange, indefinite threat.
The very short version is that there’s a company that tracks the geographical location of IP addresses, and when the company doesn’t know where an American IP address is, they set it for the geographical center of the country. With a reasonably clean longitude and latitude. And guess what? That’s in Ms. Taylor’s front yard.
Read the whole thing. I can’t do the article justice. It’s kind of horrifyingly fascinating.