So a client signed up for hosting with us and added a few dedicated IPs to their order. We require all clients to fill out a form for justification to provide to our data center for ARIN to ensure we can be allocated more IPs in the future but the client has yet to provide us with this form. Would you continue trying to contact them or just remove them from the order and refund the money?

@Jweb2,

Attempting to contact the customers may seems to be an appropriate action for the very first time but if thing goes worst, refund may be the last solution.

None of the clients would pay hundreds buck for dedicated server & not responding email / calls unless they are not a genuine order.

You will want to keep contacting the customer. Every customer you get you need to keep.

Time will tell. :)

I assume this is a reseller account the customer purchased?

If so, How many IPs did they order?

In some cases, ARIN Justification is not needed for what is considered an initial allocation of IPs to your customers. For example, when you order a new dedicated server and get 5 IPs with it.

If they ordered enough IPs to justify the justification, continue to contact them. If they do not respond within a reasonable amount of time then modify their account to use a shared IP and notify the customer of this.

IE, do not cancel their service completely - just the IPs. If they respond back to you, then add the dedicated IPs back.

How long has it been that they have not responded? I would still continue to try to contact them. Refunding would be a last resort if they continue to be unresponsive.

I assume this is a reseller account the customer purchased?

If so, How many IPs did they order?

In some cases, ARIN Justification is not needed for what is considered an initial allocation of IPs to your customers. For example, when you order a new dedicated server and get 5 IPs with it.

If they ordered enough IPs to justify the justification, continue to contact them. If they do not respond within a reasonable amount of time then modify their account to use a shared IP and notify the customer of this.

IE, do not cancel their service completely - just the IPs. If they respond back to you, then add the dedicated IPs back.

No it was a shared account and the number of IPs requested is more than a shared hosting account would normally have unless they have multiple domains that need SSLs setup which could be possible. We definitely will not cancel their service but I do not want them paying for something they do not have.

How long has it been that they have not responded? I would still continue to try to contact them. Refunding would be a last resort if they continue to be unresponsive.
It's only been 2 days since they signed up but I opened a support ticket on their behalf yesterday which I do as a reminder for all clients that order dedicated IPs if we do not receive the form in 24 hours.



Now I didn't want to bring this up, but I should also point out that although this order did pass our fraud checks (scoring a 0 on MaxMind) I still have a gut feeling that this order is possibly fraudulent based on multiple factors such as:

-The IP bypassed all pages on my website and without any refer, the first page they navigated to was the checkout cart.

-The user spent less than 30 seconds between arrival on the site and ordering (normally wouldn't be an issue if they were coming from an advertisement such as one here at WHT but the lack of referring URL leads me to believe this user ordered from an IP other than the one they were originally browsing the site from).

-When doing a search for the username they chose I found a few accounts on various sites with the same location (a country I've never heard of before this client signed up so it would be hard pressed to be a coincidence) but different first and last names.

-The total amount for the order was very large and paid with unverified Paypal.

-User purchased multiple dedicated IPs for a shared hosting account.

-User did not accept a free domain that comes with all hosting plans which is strange because for the amount the client spent I would have tried to get as much as I could out of a shared hosting plan.

I want to give the user the benefit of the doubt because there were a few signs that the order is legit aside from passing MaxMind, but in this situation I'm not going to setup multiple dedicated IPs for this account without the ARIN Justification Form.