Fifty-eight-year-old Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford is looking a lot more like the next Bernie Madoff.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Federal Bureau of Investigations are looking into the eccentric money man for alleged fraud involving his Stanford International Bank, which claims to have $8.5 billion in assets and some 30,000 investors.

Sir Stanford--he was the first American to receive knighthood from the government of Antigua and is infamous for his efforts to revive West Indian cricket--has managed to report shockingly consistent returns for years. Even in 2008, when Wall Street was hit across the board, he managed to make a 6% profit on his portfolio.

The return is even more impressive, notes Felix Salmon, given that Stanford International Bank is a bank that doesn't make loans:

"SIB, it turns out, is a very peculiar fish indeed: it offers extremely high interest rates on its deposits -- on the order of 7.5% for a one-year CD. It then takes that money and, rather than lending it out at a higher rate still, invests it in stocks and hedge funds and commodities and the like."

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