Location services: This is a bit odd...

Nightowl4933 wrote:

I will raise this with the VPN provider because I think this is definitely a problem their end, but I was just wondering if I've missed something.

I expect you are correct. I don't think you've missed anything.

Unless you're using a true VPN tunnel, such as between you and your employer's, school's or bank's servers, they provide false security from a privacy standpoint.  Read these two articles: Public VPN's are anything but private and Former Malware Distributor Kape Technologies Now Owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Zenmate, and a Collection of VPN “Review” Websites. 

Just some food for thought.

They are correct.

There is no single, absolute map of which IP addresses are where in the world.

"back in the day" there were buckets where large blocks of addresses were managed by different internet registries in different geographies (ARIN in the US, APNIC in Asia, RIPE in Europe), but over time, and with the constrained IPv4 supply that model has broken down. Companies with IP addresses in multiple regions would combine their resources, other companies would 'resell' their IP addresses they no longer needed, and the geographic controls fell to the side.

In this case, some company in Chile offloaded their IP addresses and the UK VPN company bought them.

The problem is there's no single way to track where any given IP address is. To solve this, a number of companies started using heuristics (such as traceroutes) to localize IP addresses which was a start, then they opened up and let IP address holders populate their database with location data, and then DNS was expanded to support geolocation hints alongside other DNS data.

Most companies don't maintain their own map, instead they subscribe to one (or more) of the databases that aim to track location data.

The main issues now are incomplete data, and lag. Even if the VPN service publishes LOC data in their DNS, it takes a while for that to get picked up by the databases, and therefore takes time before the rest of the world notices.

The good news is that (assuming the VPN service has done their part in updating databases and publishing LOC data), it's a problem that usually is solved with time.

Unfortunately it's nothing you can affect (other than, maybe, asking the VPN provider for an IP address in a different block, but there's probably a reason why they're using the block they have).

I have no reason to doubt their explanation.