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
Pyramid scheme "captain" is the person at the top of the tree, having received the payment from the eight paying passengers, once they leave the scheme they are able to re-enter the pyramid as a "passenger" and hopefully recruit enough to reach captain again, thereby earning a second payout. Matrix schemes use the same fraudulent, unsustainable system as a pyramid; here, the participants pay to join a waiting list for a desirable product, which only a fraction of them can ever receive. Since matrix schemes follow the same laws of geometric progression as pyramids, they are subsequently as doomed to collapse. Such