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 the sense that both pyramid and Ponzi schemes are forms of financial fraud. However, pyramid schemes are based on network marketing, where each part of the pyramid takes a piece of the pie / benefits, forwarding the money to the top of the pyramid. They fail simply because there aren't sufficient people. Ponzi schemes, on the other hand, are based on the principle of "Robbing Peter to pay Paul"—early investors are paid their returns through the proceeds of investments by later investors. In other words, one central person (or entity) in the middle taking money from one person, keeping part