Yes, I think tracking down the original wallet that you had the 1,000+ coins in is the key.
This whole story really sucks, I hate to hear it. It's a true deception of trust all around from the sounds of it. It seems like at the time you weren't very security safe when it came to Bitcoin, but I don't think many people were. You had no reason to have any alarms go off either because davout is staff here. It does all seem really crazy.
Good thing is if you can somehow prove those are your Bitcoins, it looks like they are still sitting somewhere.
Are they still offering "claims" or "refunds" for when that "hack" happened? I wonder how many bitcoins have been left behind or people just simply didn't bother with redeeming them?
It was less than $20K USD at the time when I first entrusted the bitcoins with InstaWallet, seeing that davout was staff and all and that theymos trusted him. Besides, several large wallets, some over 1,000 BTC, were refunded by InstaWallet to various (assumed, but...)
non-customers of theirs during the first refunds as seen in the txs, some of which flowed directly to Bitcoin-Central. At the onset, NOBODY with only 50 BTC in their wallets was expecting refunds until after all the ones under said amount were united first. This fact was reiterated several times, but proved to not be the case from the very first refund.
Note to self: Google wallet.dat.