Stolen iCloud, have phone, trying to save photos

Hey guys. Last week my iCloud was completely taken over and apple is saying it’s unrecoverable. I have a 3 year old and his whole life was on my iPhone. I still have my iPhone and can access my photos but I’m missing about 4.5 months of all my pictures and videos and this is very hard for me. I can see the missing photos but they are blurry and have a white exclamation point in the bottom right, and I can see the videos but when I click on them they don’t play. I think this might be because they weren’t downloaded onto my phone and they were in the cloud. From May 2024- now is completely fine and downloadable onto a hard drive, but from January 2024 -April 2024 it’s all blurry.

I also had google photos and the photo situation is the same between my camera roll/iCloud and google photos. I have been on the phone with apple and one representative told me that maybe if I go to download the photos and I cut them instead of copy them and off my phone that maybe somehow the photos and videos in google photos will be restored. I’m not sure why he thinks that could work. I was also thinking that maybe if I saved and deleted my most recent photos, that the blurred photos and broken videos might start playing. If anyone has any tips on how I might be able to recover these precious memories for my family, I would greatly appreciate it.

I am also working with local law enforcement and they are in contact with Apples legal dept and they are trying to a) help me regain control of my iCloud or b) get me a copy of my iCloud and delete my old one. If anyone has ever successfully had law enforcement step in and help, please let me know.

I realize I likely made a mistake and that’s why they got in. I don’t see anything in my emails and I do have two factor identification so I’m a little confused. But regardless, if I did this I take responsibility for it and I will be extremely careful moving forward. This has been the most violating experience of my life. There were a lot of pics and vid’s of my 3 year old son where he’s in the bath etc. I feel sick knowing someone else can see that. I’m trying to focus on the fact that the person who stole my account purchased $1,100 in video games and that must have been their motivation, not to do anything weird with my pics. The police said that the MO of someone breaking into iCloud accounts is that they steal money and then don’t go back into your account because when they are in there they can be traced. I did get a notification on an old phone the day it happened that someone from central china (it said the name of the district but I can’t remember and didn’t screen shot it) was accessing my account. And my iCloud emails that are still coming to my email have been changed to be in Chinese. We have had to get a new bank account, new credit cards, flag ourselves as potential victims of identity theft, I got a new email, a new phone and new phone number. I got a new phone because since ingot a new iCloud account I didn’t want to have to wipe my phone because I’m still hopeful I can salvage more from it or it can be used to get evidence.

Thank you for reading and for any advice you might have for me.