Madoff investment scandal to enable the Irish regulator to uncover the fraud much earlier than late 2008 when he was finally arrested in New York. The scheme began to unravel in the fall of 2008, when the general market downturn accelerated. Madoff had previously come close to collapse in the second half of 2005 after Bayou Group, a group of hedge funds, was exposed as a Ponzi scheme that used a bogus accounting firm to misrepresent its performance. By November, investors had requested $105 million in redemptions, though Madoff's Chase account only had $13 million. Madoff only survived by moving money from his
High-yield investment program encouraged to let their gains compound and to recruit new members into a "forced matrix" to increase their returns. The SEC contends that this forced matrix payout scheme constitutes a pyramid scheme. New investors had to pay a monthly subscription fee of between US$10 and US$99, and provide an initial investment of up to $10,000. The higher the initial investment, the higher the returns appeared. The SEC stated that the Zeekler website brought in only about 1% of the Zeek Rewards company's purported income and that the vast majority of disbursed funds were paid from new investments. The SEC alleges