I noticed these things. I actually live in wolverhampton, but appear to live in leeds. The only time I checked out an opponent was someone else near me who wasnt even on the map. How do chess.com know where people come from anyway?
I'm guessing it's tied up with whatever might be in your profile regarding location. Still, Wolves <-> Leeds is quite a small error when compared with my friend!!
it first looks at your location in your profile. if it doesn't find one, it uses your IP address :) and these things are very hard to have be 100% accurate.
ah... the last scenario is if they have no location, and no known IP address, then they get put at latitude/logintude of 0, which is off the coast of africa... :)
One of my online friends - berniel - lives in the UK. On the interactive map, he's shown as living somewhere in Southern India!
Weird!!