Geolocation API issues driving me nuts!

hey everyone, i'm seriously losing my mind over this. we were talking about general IP geolocation accuracy before, but now i'm stuck on something super specific and critical.

our saas relies heavily on accurate geolocation data for things like regional content delivery, license enforcement, and some basic fraud detection. for a while, it's like, okay-ish, but lately, it's just completely broken. it's not even like a small error, users are getting completely wrong countries.

the problem is, our geolocation API calls are returning wildly inconsistent results for IP address location. we've tried everything. we rotated through maxmind, ipinfo, abstractapi, you name it. it's like each one gives a different answer for the same IP, and none of them seem to consistently match where the user actually is (based on their own reports, which we verify sometimes).

i even tried to like, average the results or use a 'most common' approach, but then you get IPs that are clearly from one region being flagged as another. we suspect vpns and proxies are a huge part of this, but even 'clean' ips seem to be misidentified. we tried adding client-side hints like browser language and timezone, but that's not reliable enough for the IP itself.

here's a typical scenario from our logs, just a constant stream of this:

[ERROR] 2023-10-27 14:35:12 - IP: 103.1.2.3, GeoIP Mismatch. Expected: Australia, Actual (Provider A): Singapore, Actual (Provider B): US.
[WARN] 2023-10-27 14:35:15 - User 12345 blocked due to region discrepancy for IP 103.1.2.3.
[ERROR] 2023-10-27 14:35:20 - IP: 198.51.100.1, GeoIP Mismatch. Expected: Germany, Actual (Provider A): Netherlands, Actual (Provider B): UK.

how on earth do you guys manage this? is there a combination of geolocation API services or a specific strategy that actually works for getting reliable IP address location data for global users? especially when dealing with so many vpns and proxies? are we missing some fundamental approach here?

thanks in advance!