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
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