Participants in the Madoff investment scandal the receiver assigned to Madoff's Ponzi scheme, extracted a settlement from Tremont worth over one billion dollars. A $1 billion class-action federal lawsuit was filed in Colorado against Fiserv, Inc. of Brookfield, Wisconsin whose subsidiaries were custodians for pension or IRA accounts and invested with Madoff. The complaint alleges Fiserv failed "to hold and safeguard assets entrusted to it" by about 800 Madoff customers who had been told to hire Fiserv to handle their accounts with him. Fiserv is accused of breach of fiduciary duty, fraud, negligence and aiding and abetting breach of fiduciary. Fiserv sold its investment account administration
Pyramid scheme of it and giving the rest to others who had invested in the scheme earlier. Thus, schemes such as the Anubhav teak plantation scheme (teak plantation scam of 1998) in India can be called Ponzi schemes. Some Ponzi schemes can depend on multi-level marketing for popularizing them, thus forming a combination of the two. Some multi-level marketing (MLM) companies operate as pyramid schemes and consumers often confuse legitimate multi-level marketing with pyramid schemes. According to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission legitimate MLM, unlike pyramid schemes: Pyramid schemes however "may purport to sell a product, but they often simply use the