IANAL. You might be able to invoke some legal means to limit your losses. The associated-account story wasn’t an act of God. You might argue the developers should have known better. I’d suggest buying an hour of a lawyer’s time to see what can be done.
He asks for an app, but lets the offshore "developers" do everything including store deployments. He could take the codes, and take care of the accounts. Heck, he could even study a few hours to understand what's going on the app before submitting.
He just depended on some random company he found on a freelancer website, dumped all the money, then got punished because he let those people take 100% of control.
Good luck with lawyers.