From a legal point of view, if the domain was not suppose to expire until Sept of this year, you
have them bent over a barrell. They where "Negligent" to let it go, before it even expired. I'm
not an attorney, but I would call one right away, ESPECIALLY since you paid so much money
for the domain to start with.
If I pay $5M for a candy bar and someone steals it from me, I'm entitled to the cost of a candy bar, not what I paid for that candy bar. My stupidity doesn't reserve a reward.
No domain is "valuable." They're all arbitrary strings of characters; we've pretty well proven that people who are looking to buy a car, for instance, anre no more likely to blindly go to cars.com as anywhere else.
