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 "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