EIAs, however, will typically allow investors to pull out 10 percent a year without a penalty. Surrender periods will sometimes last longer than the clients. Imagine an 80-year-old widower buying an EIA that locks up her cash for 15 years. It was one of these lengthy lockup periods that tripped up the woman needing dentures.

Ronald A. Marron, an attorney in San Diego who has filed numerous lawsuits against EIA insurance providers, including two class-action suits, says he's seen surrender charges as high as 25 percent.

And Marron insists that ditching an EIA can involve more than paying the surrender costs. He says one of his clients, who put $1.5 million into an EIA, would have had to pay $263,000 to bail after being hit with a double whammy: a surrender penalty and something called a market value adjustment charge.

There are other reasons why EIAs are troubling.

Insurance agents, who don't possess securities licenses, are forbidden from selling stocks, bonds, mutual funds or even lowly certificates of deposit. They can, however, sell all the EIAs they want, thanks to the way they are regulated.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and the NASD don't consider EIAs to be investments - at least not yet. Consequently, these regulators don't have the authority to tell agents, who often market EIAs through free seminars, what they can or can't do even if the advice is reckless.

Some EIA promoters, for instance, are urging people to refinance their houses or take out reverse mortgages so they can free up cash to buy EIAs. Obviously, that's nuts. The NASD did issue an investor alert on EIAs last year, which you can find on the regulator's Web site (www.nasd.com). It's also auditing EIA practices at some brokerage firms, while the SEC is conducting its own investigation.

The NASD urges investors to understand how a particular EIA works before buying one. But that's a recommendation that even the people selling these complex annuities could have trouble following.