I don't know enough about the specifics to point blame at any particular people, but I find it really hard to imagine anyone could have been running a PPT and not be either aware of, or willfully blind to, the near certainty that they were paying Pirate to transfer to them money that other people were induced to transfer to him in the belief that it would be invested, and that transferring that money to them was not in fact an investment. In my opinion, that makes them scammers.

And no disclaimers would eliminate this, because the issue is not how they collected their funds but what they paid Pirate to do.

Again, I don't know enough about the facts of any specific situation to point blame at any particular people. I am not saying that any particular person is a scammer.

One of the most horrible things about Ponzi schemes is that they promise free money in way that turns honest people into scammers. Pirate cleverly tricked you into being a scammer.