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Couple wrongly ID'd as scammers sue internet firm

Chicago - A couple living on a farm in the US state of Kansas is suing an internet company for incorrectly identifying their home as the source of countless illicit activities.

James and Theresa Arnold, who live in a rural area near the geographic center of the United States, say they have been suspected of internet scams and hacking, credit card and tax fraud, and much more, thanks to the online location firm MaxMind.

The couple has "sustained great emotional distress, fear for their safety and humiliation," their attorney Randall Rathbun said in a court filing.

The Arnolds, who Rathbun said do not like to be interviewed because they are "extremely shy," moved to a rural estate five years ago and started getting visits from law enforcement from the first week.

"This scenario repeated itself countless times," Rathbun said in a complaint filed in federal court, as local, state and federal officials came "looking for a runaway child or a missing person, or evidence of a computer fraud or a call of an attempted suicide."

The couple did not know the source of their problem until earlier this year, when the news organisation Fusion published a story pointing to MaxMind, which provides a service finding where computers and other digital gadgets on the internet are physically located.

When MaxMind can't find a specific location, it assigns a default location at the center of the country.

Unbeknownst to the Arnolds, their home was that default location.

Some 600 million US internet addresses were assigned the default location, Fusion said.

MaxMind would not confirm the figure.

MaxMind spokesperson David Robbins told AFP that the company used latitude and longitude coordinates provided in the US Central Intelligence Agency's World Factbook, available online, to assign the default location for the center of the United States.

"Our data is not to be used down to the household level, so we were unaware of any issues that were being caused," he said.

"Once we became aware of it, we made an adjustment."

The default location is currently a lake.

The Arnolds are suing for an unspecified amount of compensatory and punitive damages in excess of $75 000.

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