Madoff investment scandal Madoff struggled to keep the scheme afloat. In November 2008, Madoff Securities International (MSIL) in London made two fund transfers to Bernard Madoff Investment Securities of approximately $164 million. MSIL had neither customers nor clients, and there is no evidence that it conducted any trades on behalf of third parties. Madoff received $250 million around December 1, 2008, from Carl J. Shapiro, a 95-year-old Boston philanthropist and entrepreneur who was one of Madoff's oldest friends and biggest financial backers. On December 5, he accepted $10 million from Martin Rosenman, president of Rosenman Family LLC, who later sought to recover the
Pyramid scheme the person at the front. Organizers can further profit by starting a scheme with a queue with "shill" names that must be cleared out before genuine people get to the front. The scheme collapses when no more people are willing to join the queue. Schemes may not reveal, or may attempt to exaggerate, a prospective joiner's queue position, a condition that essentially means the scheme is a lottery. Some countries have ruled that matrix schemes are illegal on that basis. While often confused for each other, pyramid schemes and Ponzi schemes are different from each other. They are related in