PrimeTime: 'Dinner Party' Pyramid

Feb. 22 -- Robbie Bradford, 39, was invited to join a women's group that seemed to offer opportunities for personal empowerment and community service. Tara Jordan, a working mother and part-time student in Arlington, Texas, thought it would be "wonderful" and "life-changing."

It's called a "dinner party" and is billed as a charity group or gifting program that brings women together to find "financial support" and help them make a "positive impact on humanity."

But it's actually an old trick that's been reappearing in a new guise throughout the United States, leaving thousands of women feeling duped.

"I'm a levelheaded person," says Jordan. "I like to think I make good decisions. How could I do this?"

A Pyramid By Any Other Name… Each dinner party operates as if it were a four-course meal: appetizer, soup and salad, entrée and dessert (see interactive explainer).

Eight "guests" put in $5,000 cash at the appetizer level; all of their money is "gifted" to one woman at the dessert level, who then leaves the pyramid with $40,000. The pyramid then splits into two, and everyone moves up a notch, creating eight new appetizer-level slots in each pyramid to be filled.

The process repeats itself, with the pyramids continuing to multiply in an endless rotation that's referred to as "the perpetual cycle of charitable giving."

"They can call it anything they want to," says detective Mike Haines of the Dallas Police Department Swindle Unit. "It's an illegal pyramid scheme…someone, if the scheme plays out, will always lose their money."

Haines — who has seen such pyramid schemes with varying names and themes for nearly 20 years — says lawmakers have "made it illegal for a reason…somebody's going to get burned on the scam."