Participants in the Madoff investment scandal Participants in the Madoff investment scandal Investigators are looking for other participants in the Madoff investment scandal besides Bernard Madoff, despite Madoff's assertion that he alone was responsible for the large-scale Ponzi scheme. Harry Sussman, an attorney representing several clients of the firm, stated that "someone had to create the appearance that there were returns," and further suggested that there must have been a team buying and selling stocks, forging books, and filing reports. James Ratley, president of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners said, "In order for him to have done this by himself, he would have had to
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