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 and are being prosecuted for the crime of "illegal massive money reception." The "Kyiv Post" reported on 26 November 2008 that American citizen Robert Fletcher (Robert T. Fletcher III; aka "Rob") was arrested by the SBU (Ukraine State Police) after being accused by Ukrainian investors of running a Ponzi scheme and associated pyramid scam netting US$20 million. (The "Kiev Post" also reports that some estimates are as high as US$150 million.) In the United Kingdom in 2008 and 2009, a £21 million pyramid scheme named 'Give and Take' involved at least 10,000 victims in the south-west of England and South