Dear Sean, On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 10:38:49AM -0700, Sean Pedersen wrote:
This is more or less the situation we're in. We contacted the customer and they informed us the matter is in dispute with the RIR and that their customer (the assignee) is in the process of resolving the issue. We have to allow them time to accomplish this. I've asked for additional information to help us understand the nature of the dispute. In that time we received another request to stop announcing the prefix(s) in addition to a new set of prefixes, and a threat to contact our upstream providers as well as ARIN - which is not the RIR the disputed resources are allocated to.
I've seen disputes too between end users and RIRs - usually this is due to non-payment. It can be helpful to do two things: set a reasonable deadline for the customer to resolve this, and verify with the RIR whether the dispute is actually ongoing or whether the RIR closed the case. Example case: customer said they were in dispute, but RIR indicated that the case was closed. If the RIR closed the case, I'd lean to dropping the announcement.
This is a new(er) customer, so there is some merit to dropping the prefix and letting them sort it out based on the current RIR contact(s). However, there is obvious concern over customer service and dropping such a large block of IPs.
Size of the block often is a poor indicator for legitimacy. Kind regards, Job