Location "Spoofing"

Hey folks I recently saw a node pop up that was just shy of 1000 miles away. I wanted to double check my understanding of how the location of nodes is determined.

Theoretically this person could have set the lat/long hard coded in the settings and could be shown anywhere. I am assuming that is what happened here as that sort of distance seems crazy to me. They did have 7 hops to get to me but even then I am dubious.

Thinking about this more I am guessing MQTT could be at play as well and I need to do some more reading there.