.la Registrar sold me domain names that were "technically already reserved"

Back on June 13, I registered 8 domain names in the new .la domain. (See my triumphant posting here.)

However, some of the domains didn't work when I tried to forward them to URLs at my site. I sent an email to dreamhost, and I've now been informed that they "had a problem with our registration system on the 13th and 14th, and the http://www.la/ was erroneously giving out some domains that were technically already reserved..."

Three of the domains I registered work as expected; the five ones that don't work are:

active.la
insider.la
living.la
meet.la
run.la

The price for the first four was $50/year, the price for run.la was marked as "premium" at $100/year.

They inform me that they've refunded my money for those domains ($300), and are giving me an additional $50 credit. However, I had already started work on run.la, which I think would have been quite a popular site. I was looking forward to placing a personals service at meet.la, and various other services at the other domains.

Has anyone else had something like this happen to them?

Comments

Our organization's ".la" domain has been deactivated, ostensibly for failure to renew the registration. However, we are acutally paid up for more than a year in advance.

DreamHost has not responded to our e-mails, faxes, or phone messages. We have heard that others are having similar problems with their ".la" domains.