Madoff investment scandal to enable the Irish regulator to uncover the fraud much earlier than late 2008 when he was finally arrested in New York. The scheme began to unravel in the fall of 2008, when the general market downturn accelerated. Madoff had previously come close to collapse in the second half of 2005 after Bayou Group, a group of hedge funds, was exposed as a Ponzi scheme that used a bogus accounting firm to misrepresent its performance. By November, investors had requested $105 million in redemptions, though Madoff's Chase account only had $13 million. Madoff only survived by moving money from his
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