"We are literally creating a new economic experience," says the blurb. In fact, Britain's women are being seduced into the oldest economic experience of all: being conned. "Women Empowering Women" is a pyramid scheme, which requires people to hand over money in the hope of seeing their cash multiply when new suckers are recruited. All such pyramids eventually crumble.

"Women Empowering Women" relies on each participant finding eight new participants, each of whom has to stump up ?3,000, which is then passed up the (strictly female) hierarchy. It seems to have originated in America and to have appeared on the Isle of Wight in March. Thousands of women there lost their money after the supply of recruits dried up. Roughly two months later it resurfaced on the mainland. Since then, according to the Trading Standards Institute, it has appeared in 15 towns and cities across Britain, as far afield as London and Glasgow.

The Department of Trade and Industry says that pyramid schemes are unusual in Britain, and one aimed at women seems a novelty. But a recent government-sponsored review says that, thanks to the National Lottery, Britain is more comfortable than it used to be with gambling. That may help explain this scheme's success.

Officials don't like it, but there is nothing they can do about it. Although pyramid selling schemes, in which improbably high rates of return on bonds are financed by the next lot of sales, are against the law, nobody involved in "Women Empowering Women" is either buying or selling. Publicising the scheme's dangers is difficult, too. Those in it are anxious to extol its merits to their friends, according to Allan Charlesworth, who heads the TSI, but those who have lost out "keep quiet and put it down to experience." Such gifting schemes can grow and collapse very quickly, and "Women Empowering Women" may well have run its course already. If so, those on the lower levels of the pyramid are about to lose their money. That may not be the end of it, though. On the Isle of Wight, a group of women who lost money in Women Empowering Women have started a "community investment club" whose structure, the blurb explains, is much better than the previous scheme. Participants are asked to hand over ?100 and are promised ?88,300 in return. (The Economist)