... Speaking of which, there is a user on Soulseek that has this album ripped in 24 kHz / 96.0 kHz FLAC, but, unfortunately, the files are locked and the user does not reply to my messages. 
Don't be too sad. The rip of said user may well be a fake, deliberate or not.
Note that I do not know that user. But on the internet you should never discount the possibility of someone simply taking the piss.
Oh I definitely agree on that, it's unfortunate that "fake lossless" is a thing. Imagine my surprise, when I found out that quite a lot of songs and albums I bought on Qobuz/Bandcamp/Deezer were lossy FLACs... And that whole I MARC 4 catalog - man, I'm still mad that someone sometime in the archival/digitization process decided that MP3 is the way to go...
I understand that majority of people don't care about these things, and I shouldn't be upset either because those MP3s and lossy FLACs sound totally fine. I'm certain that I wouldn't be able to tell apart a true FLAC vs a fake one. Nevertheless, I like to make music and I have my own reasons why I want true lossless - but that is not a topic of this thread, so I'll just leave it at that.
Regarding the user I mentioned - I'm 98% sure that the rip isn't a fake one. That user's records' collection is huge with some very obscure rarities, and most of them are in WAV/FLAC. We have exchanged a couple of digitized records in the past, and everything was legit - well, at least the stuff we exchanged, don't know about the rest, but I'm inclined to believe that he/she knows his/her stuff.
