Although the motives behind this fraud are still unknown at this time, apparently Matthew Whitton and Ricky Dyer, the men who claimed they discovered the body, are no where to be found.

According to a story posted on SearchingForBigfoot.com by Steve Kulls, Executive Director of Squatchdetective.com and Host of Squatchdetective Radio, requested an undisclosed sum from Tom Biscardi, CEO of Searching for Bigfoot, as an advance, expected from the marketing and promotion.

On August 16th Matthew Whitton and Ricky Dyer delivered the freezer containing the alleged corpse to the Searching For Bigfoot Team. However, as the ice started to melt down, Kulls was quick to discover that the alleged corpse is just a rubber costume.

After discovering the fraud, Tom Biscardi contacted the alleged Bigfoot trackers at their California hotel and set up a meeting. Obviously enough, when the time came for them to face the consequences of their actions, the two were nowhere to be found. They had vanished and so had Tom Biscardi’s money.

Apparently, little to nothing is known about their wehereabouts, as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that the calls to Matthew Whitton and Ricky Dyer weren't returned.
Matthew Whitton, 28, is a police office who had been on medical leave after being shot in the wrist by a robbery suspect this year, but was fired after his boss heard about the charade.
"He's disgraced himself, he's an embarrassment to the Clayton County Police Department, his credibility and integrity as an officer is gone, and I have no use for him," Chief Jeffrey Turner said. "His behavior is unbecoming of that of a police officer.”

The whole story started last week when Matthew Whitton and Ricky Dyer claimed that they had discovered a specimen of Bigfoot in a remote forest in northern Georgia.

Bigfoot also known as Sasquatch, Chiye, Yeti, Yeren and Yowie is considered the Holy Grail for cryptozoologists. The creature is sometimes described as a large, hairy bipedal hominoid without knowing for sure whether it existed or not. Some experts consider its existence as a combination of folklore and hoaxes. But alleged witnesses have come out with a description of this creature. Its head seems to sit directly on the shoulders. It has large eyes, a pronounced brow ridge, and a low-set forehead.

Matthew Whitton and Rick Dyer , along with Tom Biscari, have put together a press conference to announce their findings. At the news conference, attended by over 200 people, Matthew Whitton, Rick Dyer and Tom Biscardi, who assured everyone that the story of the discovery couldn’t be more real, handed out two new photos, but the doubts have started to emerge since the first seconds.

“It looks like a costume, a waterlogged costume that's been stuffed into a freezer. It just doesn't have the hallmark of a real corpse,” Jeff Meldrum, an associate professor of anatomy and anthropology at Idaho State University, and one of the few PhDs conducting Bigfoot field work, said.

Anatomy professor Jeffrey Meldrum told the Discovery Channel that the creatures in the photos presented by Whitton and Dyer did not look "natural" but instead appeared to be a gorilla costume widely available for purchase.

Alleged sightings of Bigfoot have made headlines for years, including in 1958 when a forest worker claimed to have come across its footprints in Northern California and in 1967 when another American took fuzzy film footage of a large, hairy creature walking in a Northern California forest.

In 2002, a Bigfoot hoax was uncovered after the death of Ray Wallace in the United States. His son confessed that Wallace had donned self-made wooden feet to tromp through mud in a Bigfoot "discovery" that made the local newspaper. Wallace also faked photos and audiotapes of what were supposed to be the creature with the help of friends, his son said.

Update: AP reported also that telephone calls to Whitton and Dyer were not returned on Tuesday, but the news agency also noted that the voicemail recording for their Bigfoot Tip Line, which proclaims they also search for leprechauns and the Loch Ness monster, has been updated. It announced the two former police officers were also looking for "big cats and dinosaurs".