"Zone Hold" by third party vendor

Hello I’m trying to add a zone for a customer of mine but we’re seeing that there is a zone hold preventing us from adding the zone. Our assumption is that there is a zone owned by different vendor that they no longer use and that the vendor has a lock on the zone. We have contacted support and their generic answer is to contact the owner of the zone with the hold. It doesn’t seem like a solution to have to negotiate with an ex-vendor to get a lock removed for a zone they own. What if they refuse or are no longer in business? The biggest problem here is that a domain owned by our customer is locked by a third party without any ability to remove that control. So this means that the vendor can hold the zone hostage and prevent our customer from using Cloudflare unless they decide to remove the lock? In addition to this - we don’t even know if it is indeed a lock from the said vendor, it could be any company that ever had control over a zone they no longer own. How can we get this lock removed and/or remove the vendor’s control of the zone?