It looks like you can pay $300 to rescue the domain. That's a fair price, considering it'll cost about $200 or more once you let the domain go and it goes into redemption anyway. Maybe he backordered the name and got it for about $60 tho also.
He should probably have redirected it straight to his expired domain sales site or parked it somewhere that would have targeted it better instead.
http://www.credonic.com/