It has been a long time since I contacted someone to potentially (not) buy an account that was high level in those days; as most things like these, it can be renegotiated, it just depends on how desperate the other person is and how persuasive you are.
Some keep holding onto it because of the sunk-cost fallacy, but part of them do want to get rid of it.
Since we're talking about DSP possibly trying to save his reputation, a reminder that he just needs an old account, not a whale one, which means that he can go for way lower than 1K, if he chose to.