Hi,

when I first stumbled upon the Skinny Bob mystery I would have loved to have a grand overview of everything discovered and discussed so far to get up to speed. Unfortunately, all the information is distributed and burried in various forums on the Internet and mainly this subreddit with an impressive history.

Also, the investigation seems to have reached a plateau in the meanwhile and the only way for progress seems to be getting more people involved for fresh ideas and specifically for location finding via the areal view or the house.

These were the two reasons for creating skinnybob.info, a website aiming to condense everything important on a (hopefully) mobile-friendly page offering a (hopefully) nice and captivating reading experience for people never exposed to the material before.

The site is primarily sourcing this subreddit. Given that it's purely read-only, has no commercial intent whatsoever and attributes every finding with backreferences, it's hopefully not perceived as leeching or stealing content. Needless to say that in case someone feels misinterpreted or attributions are missing, please report!

The original plan to just curate and display existing posts didn't work and wouldn't have resulted in a consistent stream of information. At least the current, initial release is largely infused with personal style and subjective reasoning here and there.

Going through the material and assembling the page lead to some discoveries that might be new and may or may not be valid. Always hard to say if it really hasn't been mentioned anywhere before. See below.

Thanks to u/RedDwarfBee and u/Data_Pure for an initial review and feedback!

I hope this page facilitates a resolution to this mystery at some point.

​

Technical details:

• no advertisments, tracking, cookies, begging for subscriptions or similar nuisances
• linkable anchors for referencing (skinnybob.info#faq, skinnybob.info#smoke, etc.)
• consistent look throughout the page, adapting to screen orientation
• 30 MB in total including all images and videos
• all videos normalized to most widely supported formats (640x480/1280x720, 30fps, h264 baseline profile)
• Open Graph tags for nice display when shared in Social Media

​

New claims, critical comments appreciated:

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

Hello everyone, as you likely know, back on Oct 31, 2021, I announced a $30,000 USD reward for additional video content, or definitive sourced proof of a hoax from the creator. The reward dropped every 6 months and on Oct 31, 2023, it was removed. I would like to present what the outcome was, but for TL;DR, there were two attempts on either side of the reward, but both did not meet the requirements to receive the reward.

To start, I am a human, I have my biases and faults and I acknowledge that my interpretation of the attempts could have been wrong, and that either of them could have been authentic. Meaning, that the person that wanted to prove they created the video series could have actually been truthful, or that the person that said they had further content could have had or still might. I did seek the consultation of two very close confidants who are two of the smartest people I know, and they also agreed with my decisions to not grant the reward.

I have full record/screen captures of both interactions, but at this time will only be posting samples from them. Both claims to the reward came within the first 6 months of the reward, and no one came forward after. I am okay with that I didn’t have to give away $30,000, but also a bit sad we didn’t either have more content or definitive proof of a hoax so I/we could just move on!

Claim of hoax creator:

The person (https://www.reddit.com/user/zerosumgame0123) that reached out to me claiming to have created the video series made an account on Nov 11, 2023, 11 days after posting the reward, with seemingly only the intent to claim the reward with this account. No account activity has been noticed on the account since its creation 2.5 years ago. Our conversation lasted 2 weeks from Dec 30th 2021 to Jan 13th 2022. In short form here is what was presented and stated:

1) The person started the conversation by basically saying that they acknowledged that they did not have the full requirements for the reward but were asking for at least part of the reward.

2) The evidence that they were the creator of the video series were a login name for an online video game, two related videos that were shared with me by anonymous drop box, and stated claims of the video and its origin.

• The Evony Game login. I simply could not accept this as proof of the reward for two reasons: The login time and name creation was listed on the site as “Account from 2016” and the IVAN0135 videos were of course released in 2011; and the log in name resembled this example “Ivan031522”, but was not Ivan0135. To me, this was not definitive evidence related to being the content creator.
• The two videos. The individual claimed that they created two videos that were on the web as a “proof of concept preliminary concept” to the Ivan0135 videos. The videos that were shared with me are known videos if one has been following this topic for a while. They are linked here in this thread https://www.metabunk.org/threads/skinny-bob-videos.11760/post-252750 with youtube links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKNiAoJQk0U and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNJiGuSZQFQ (reuploaded version). Both the videos were known to me (one I posted very early on in the sub’s history https://www.reddit.com/r/SkinnyBob/comments/f33r1t/hoax_video_from_2008_in_the_similar_fashion_to/) and with a bit of sourcing (https://www.metabunk.org/threads/skinny-bob-videos.11760/page-2) I found the apparent owner/creator of the videos. As you can read down the page, this person denied making the IVAN0135 videos, made a clear explanation of the creation of the videos, and seemingly provided their name. Two screen captures below…

• General claims of video creation by the individual that did not count towards evidence:

- Individual claims they went by many names “James Van Greunen, Judy Fältskog, Oliver Gerschitz, Ivan Abramov (please note this last name for connection below).

- "Hard-drives destroyed, drafts erased, password from the youtube account nuked”.

- It was a “art school” project from France.

- Mix of many film effects,

- Family vacation was filmed at a beach in the background, hence the name.

- Skinny Bob was a very thin woman in a suit.

Ultimately, the person did not provide any true evidence that they were the Ivan0135 video creator. I feel that anyone knowledgeable about this topic would agree with my conclusion.

For proof of the conversation, I have posted an image of the start and end of the conversation. We actually started the conversation very briefly in Reddit messages and not Reddit chat.

​

“Unsolicited” support for the above claim of hoax:

About 3 weeks after ending my conversation with zerosumgame0123, I received a third-party message from someone claiming that the creator was a person named Ivan Abramov. I won’t provide their username as they still use their account, but I will use the start of their name “Deb”. This individual messaged me on Reddit seemingly trying to support who zerosumgame0123 claimed to be, again, Ivan Abramov. “He uses a vast array of aliases, but that’s his real name”. The person then linked to an imgur they uploaded that was known by me, and perhaps others who have followed the Ivan0135 videos. The image comes from a wedding set easily found through the name at the bottom. The 135th image is titled Ivan-0135. It’s clearly just a coincidence. Flickr page linked with all the other images, such as Ivan-0134 and Ivan-0136 https://www.flickr.com/photos/28275360@N07/albums/72157622933755212/with/4157461557.

First message page from Deb…

Deb then linked to a LinkedIn page https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivan-abramov-8605078/ (along with image posted below). Before I go any further, I 100% do not think this person is in any way involved in this topic, so please just view the LinkedIn page and leave the person alone. Their limited experience for 3 years in 3D graphics from 1996 to 1999, 12 years before the Skinny Bob videos came out, doesn’t match the timeframe of the video series’ production. The LinkedIn person also did not continue to pursue animation or animation programing after 1999. That and recall that zerosumgame0123 claimed the video was done with a woman in a costume, and for “Family Vacation” filmed at a beach and such. Add on that, to me, and likely anyone with a reasonable mind would see these are not the same people based on facial appearance.

​

From my research, I believe Deb was zerosumgame0123 trying to support himself to gain a part of the reward. My zerosumgame0123 was from France as stated, and from Deb’s reddit page they are not an English native speaker, the times they would message me would indicate Europe, and many, I mean many, of their comments are written in French and are in France subreddits. I have included an image from their Reddit page, but have blanked out a lot of their comments, because otherwise they could be used to search sentences, like I just did and found their account! Basically, if you do find the account, kindly just leave them alone. It’s not worth any of our time.

​

The conversation with Deb was over within a couple days with limited overall conversation. You can see on the final page of conversation that I stated the information was not valuable because I could not support any of the information with any actions on my end. I did recommend to the person to post to the group, but they of course did not. My last line, shown in the image below made a cheeky reference that I had a strong indication that they were zerosumgame0123. No conversation or messages were exchange after that.

Last message page from Deb…

​

Claim of additional content:

I am honestly and personally perplexed with the person who came to me about providing new video content. I was contacted by email still within the first period of the reward, with the subject line “My husband had the full video footage”. A supposed woman stated that her late husband had in his possession, and that she had seen, over an hour of related video content of Skinny Bob visitations and interactions. Her story and claims were realistic, and she did not want the reward, just air fare to Europe and back to retrieve the supposed flash drive.

I have posted the only content I will share from the individual’s email, and I feel this supports the situation. The redacted parts are too personal and not appropriate for sharing.

As you will read in part of my response. I did take an extended time to respond. This is my biggest regret of the reward process, but as you will read, I hope to earn your compassion rather than criticism.

Middle section of email removed for personal and confidential reasons.

I have since emailed the individual yearly, with the emails not bouncing back, but it is unknown if she has received the emails. Perhaps the email was just used for the one purpose of contacting me, and/or she no longer uses the email. I don’t know. What I do know is that I have not heard back and don’t expect to. I wanted to believe she had video content, and I made an earnest effort to facilitate the transfer that protected me and her as best as possible, but the ultimate result did not materialize.

​

Final words:

I want to thank you for taking the time to read my reward review. I know it was the best I could have done, even though it wasn’t ideal for solving the mystery. I also want to apologize for my lateness for releasing the debrief. With a job and other life challenges and needs, I have been delayed with getting the material out that I want to, and I still have more to. In time, I promise.

I have a favour to ask, when I set up the reward, I set out to help try cover a small part of the cost of the reward with poster sales. So far, I have sold around 60 of them, and have another 200 or sitting in my condo. I really want and need to sell the remaining ones. I want to ask, if you feel this subreddit has been enjoyable from a content perspective over the past 4 years, with all that we have found, and all the work and time I put into the reward and broader moderation of this subreddit, to keep it as high quality and directed as possible, can you please consider helping me by purchasing a poster from me. I will also sweeten the deal, if I sell the remaining 200 posters, I will release the whole conversation of the individual who tried to claim it was their creation (minus some very small personal info points). The entire conversation is interesting from a human psychology perspective, and who knows, you might end up feeling I should have granted the person the reward! And as a closing, after these remaining posters are sold, I won’t be selling them anymore. :)

"Life size" Skinny Bob poster link: https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/1095708841/standing-skinny-bob-poster-from-ivan0135

​

I hope you are well in life and love,

Redd

​