I’ve seen this on IP lookups I’ve done when roaming - surely this is a bad idea for latency? What’s the motivation? Why would they cripple performance further by proxying to an endpoint that could be half away around the world.
This is especially infuriating as a European visiting the US, where a bunch of services are geo-fenced to American IPs. In several towns, I couldn't pay for parking or buy a bus ticket because the online service is geo-fenced and there's no brick-and-mortar alternative anymore. They also restrict apps in the play store or whatever to US accounts. I had to buy a cheap SIM card to get around all that. It's insane.
It's absolutely horrible - I was in California a few months ago and all my traffic was being sent back to the UK - 300ms ping and about 1mbps each way.
I recall now it was a Twilio Global SIM - I was just using it as an early global sim rather than building on it - all traffic went back to T-Mobile in the US it seemed