NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - In the months after Enron's spectacular collapse, a Web site called The Daily Enron drew an assorted crowd -- company employees, burned investors, and the curious -- looking for the latest news in the unfolding scandal.

Today, visitors to www.thedailyenron.com will find something drastically different. Instead of information about lost money, visitors are told how to make money -- gobs of it.

"Make money while you sleep, with no advertising and no recruiting!" blares the homepage. How to make this dream come true? According to the site, simply sign up for "The Daily Enron Cash Randomizer," sit back and watch the "free money" flow.

Here's how The Daily Enron is supposed to work: every new member, after paying a $4 setup fee and registering with either PayPal or StormPay, immediately pays $8 to another "randomly" selected member. The recipient of that $8 is part of a massive rotating database.

As each new member signs up, an existing member gets that individual's $8 registration fee. The more people sign up, the more "Random $8 Instant Payments" there are to go around.

The site -- "Your Internet Money Making Machine" -- doesn't specify how many automatic deposits a member can expect to receive. But the site gives members the option of upgrading their "Randomizer rotation" by adding more entries to the database. Upgrade options start at $2 and go as high as $1,000.

Who gets the extra money paid by members to boost their insta-payment odds is also not clear from the site description.

The Daily Enron has a new owner and a new mission.

Four consumer advocates who reviewed the site at CNN/Money's request said "The Daily Enron Cash Randomizer" appears, at best, to be a lottery of sorts and, at worst, a pyramid scheme. The Federal Trade Commission considers both to be illegal but couldn't yet comment specifically on the legality of The Daily Enron.

Robert Fitzpatrick, the president of Pyramid Scheme Alert, a consumer information Web site, said The Daily Enron smells fishy. "It's operating based on a mathematical trick, which is that there are an endless number of people behind you putting in $8 and so it's always going to grow," he said.

Problem is, Fitzpatrick said, the math doesn't compute. Generating the huge returns that the site implies requires a never ending flood of new members. Conservative types risk breaking even or losing only $12 (which includes the $4 setup charge). But for those who aim for the $1,000 elite status, the stakes are much higher.

Sterling Davenport, a self-employed Web site developer who launched "The Daily Enron Randomizer" a month ago, said in an interview that so far only 10 people have signed up for $8 instant payments, including himself and his wife Joyce. No charter member, he said, has invested more than $40.

Davenport, a Loretto, Tenn., resident, bought the domain name in April, according to public records. He said Tuesday that the site's "link popularity" prompted him to plunk down about $250 to buy the domain after its registration expired.

Davenport said he operates about 150 Web sites and makes most of his money off sales of "enhancement drugs."

One observer who is not amused by The Daily Enron's new identity: the founder of the original Daily Enron.

Michael Lux, a political consultant and president of American Family Voices, a consumer advocacy group, helped launch the original www.thedailyenron.com site after the Houston energy company's implosion in late 2001. The idea, said Lux, was to provide the public with daily updates on the company's freefall.

On a good day, he said the site drew a few hundred thousand viewers. But as corruption charges quickly engulfed other corporate giants, Lux morphed the site into a more general economic overview with a new name, "The Daily Reality Check." He let the registration for www.thedailyenron.com lapse.

Lux, who was unaware of the site's new identity until this reporter's call Monday, phoned back later to say he is now exploring legal action against the new owner. He said his claim would be based on intellectual property law.

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"They have letterhead and some graphics that are very close to our old site," said Lux, adding that he may try to "shut them down."

But Lux was also upset that a site once dedicated to educating burned Enron investors now suspiciously promises one-time memberships that will "pay you over and over!"

"It looks like some kind of serious scam," said Lux. "It is kind of ironic, isn't it?"

Echoed Fitzpatrick of Pyramid Scheme Alert: "The idea that people who went to a site to hear about their lost savings are now going to a site to be randomized? Take the 'r-a-n' off and put in 's-o'."

Davenport, however, shrugged off the litigation threat and the general outrage, saying he jumped at an opportunity that the site's original owners passed up. "You snooze you lose," said Davenport. He also noted the transformation could have been worse.

"It could have turned into a porn site," he said.