An illegal “pyramid” scam has been secretly sweeping Maine. It is a get-rich-quick scheme that often calls itself Women Helping Women, a name swiped from a longstanding legitimate organization that supports battered women.

It works like this: Women who enter the scam in groups of eight must pay $5,000 each. They work their way up in a series of dinner parties, getting $40,000 apiece when they reach the top. To keep the system going, each woman must recruit eight others, and each of those must recruit eight more, and so on.

In Ellsworth, District Attorney Michael Povich, gets 25 telephone calls a week from women wanting to know if they should enter the game and whether it’s legal. He tells them it isn’t. And he says if they win they should give the money back. He probably knows the name of one Ellsworth woman who, according to common knowledge, has already won $40,000.

The scam is illegal because the Legislature has made it so. It will eventually collapse because it will run out of new suckers. A few will get $40,000 each. Each of the others will have lost $5,000, some of whom have been encouraged to pay the entry fee without telling family members about it.

Mr. Povich shows in this diagram how the pyramid must fail as each member must recruit eight new members:

8

64

512

4,096

32,768

262,144

2,097,152

As you can see, the sucker list outstrips the population of Bangor at about the fifth level and amounts to twice the state population at the seventh level. The game’s result, of course, is that almost everyone loses, and they don’t lose just a dollar or two. Enough cautious people in Maine will ensure that the scam doesn’t reach even the sixth level of the pyramid, but before it goes any further, Maine women should really help themselves by refusing to play the game.