These are two completely different thing's.  A faucet as I say pay's cents per hour and is dust payments.  So it is a horrible way to spend time but you know going into it that you will make little for many hours of work.

Ponzi are harder to tell think of like the fake cloud mining sites.  They ask for X amount and claim you will get great returns. They pay some people with other peoples money just shuffling money around.  They do this till they have the most money they think they will get... then disappear in most cases.  But a Ponzi will always want money, and proof of payment for a small period of time does not prove something is not a ponzi do the shuffling of money mentioned above.