Now, Ambrosino is among the long list of investors whose fortunes were allegedly wiped out by Bernard Madoff. Like them, she's left hoping for a bailout that might never come.

She plans to sue Madoff but that could take years to work through the courts and yield little in the end. Her best hope to recoup some of her money is from the Securities Investor Protection Corp., an industry-funded organization set up by the government to protect investors from fraud.

But, here's the problem: SIPC does not have enough money to pay out all the claims that are sure to come from one of the biggest fraud cases to ever hit Wall Street. Securities attorneys say the organization has a reputation of being tough to squeeze money from, and each investor is only entitled to a maximum payout of $500,000 if a claim is approved.

SIPC officials say the books of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC are in complete disarray and could take six months or more to piece them together. With bills piling up and her bank account vanishing, the one thing Ambrosino and others caught in the alleged $50 billion fraud don't have is time.

"It feels like I'm drowning, and someone is saying 'we're going to save you, but we have to build the boat first,'" said Ambrosino, 55, who had $1.6 million invested with Madoff. "We can't wait for SIPC to go through all the papers."

The government created SIPC in 1970 to reimburse investors duped by brokerages in areas such as unauthorized trading or theft. SIPC is set up to cover losses of up to $500,000, and $100,000 of that amount can be claims for cash holdings that were lost.