[icedchai]

You may have been looking in the wrong spot? You can see plenty of prefixes in 192.160.0.0/16 currently announced. Check out https://stat.ripe.net/widget/routing-history

When ARIN contacts you, it's through email. They send an email with a confirmation link, so that probably bounced.

You can definitely announce BGP from a VPS with some providers. I have been doing this for years. Vultr will do it. However, they will validate (through email) that you "own" the block.

My recommendation is you first contact ARIN and see if you can "recover" contact info associated with the class C.

There are some restrictions around legacy blocks that predate the existing of ARIN. For some reason, they cannot reclaim them easily. So they just sit there...