They tend to be pillars of the community, wealthy, high-profile men less than shy with the trappings of their accumulated riches. They wear expensive watches, drive expensive cars and own expensive homes.

And they like to give millions away to charity.

All while robbing investors blind.

Add Texas billionaire R. Allen Stanford to the growing list of seemingly successful businessmen now suspected of using elaborate masks of respectability to run large-scale financial frauds.

Stanford has joined the likes of Bernard L. Madoff, Arthur G. Nadel, Nicholas Cosmo and Marcus Schrenker, all of whom led charmed lives as high-rolling financiers until investigators tumbled their houses of cards.

Fraud investigators say these men share many of the same personality traits. Not least among these traits is a huge ego, usually fed by creating a false sense of infallibility through meticulously honed images as sharp financial minds also generous with their money.

“You can’t do this without having the appearance of success. You have to give off the air of success,” said Michael Goldberg, a Florida attorney who specializes in financial fraud cases.

Madoff, who is accused of running perhaps the largest Ponzi scheme in history, was for several decades a widely respected Wall Street figure, at one point chairman of the electronic Nasdaq Stock Market in the early 1990s. Meanwhile, he and his family were involved with numerous charities, and he courted charities for his now-collapsed investment firm.

Stanford, whose Houston offices were raided by federal investigators on Tuesday, cultivated an image as a caring philanthropist while cozying up to politicians on the Caribbean island of Antigua, home to his offshore bank.

A Securities and Exchange Commission complaint charges Stanford with running a multibillion-dollar fraud propped up by certificates of deposits that generated unlikely returns.

Hedge fund advisor Nadel was a pillar of Sarasota, Fla., community, raising his profile with donations to various charities including Habitat for Humanity.  

Nadel turned himself in last month after being accused of swindling investors -- many of them friends and neighbors of his tightly knit community -- out of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Similar portraits have emerged of Long Island investment advisor Cosmo and Indiana-based Schrenker since their arrests in January.

“They know how to insinuate themselves into society so that they’re trusted, credible, believable,” said Bill E. Branscum, a financial crimes investigator in Naples, Fla. “They sit on boards. They give a lot of money away. Why not, it’s other peoples’ money.”

Securities fraud experts say gaining investors’ trust is the key to keeping the scams alive.

Les Henderson, an author who has studied financial scams for decades, said the air of success is the first step in building that trust.

“That’s what draws the early investors in. The [people running the frauds] have the gift of gab. They don’t need to know anything other than how to impress people. Then they embellish their integrity through donations. They want to be in the news all the time and it’s usually through charitable organizations. It’s all about trust,” he said.

The tried and true method for building that trust is for investment fraud operators to present themselves as richer and smarter than their targets.

Madoff, for instance, apparently used his Wall Street connections to make himself look legitimate in the eyes of potential investors. Other scammers need to start from scratch.

“These guys move into a small town in Ohio and they build the biggest home, buy the biggest car, buy a restaurant,” said Goldberg, the Florida attorney.

Eventually, by virtue of this high-profile lifestyle, the scammer builds up a network of people who trust him.

Early investors who are paid off handsomely using the proceeds from new investors act as inadvertent missionaries for the fraud operator, rushing to tell their friends about the great deal they’ve discovered.

“Typically these things begin through word of mouth,” said Goldberg. “You’ve got to build up a network of people who trust you and who will go out and tell other people this is the greatest thing.”

Another common trait shared by men who steal peoples’ life savings is a pathological level of self-absorption.

“Otherwise the remorse and your conscience would eat you up. You’d be suicidal. How could you stand it?” asked Branscum. “They’re sociopaths. You’ve got to be a sociopath to destroy these people the way they do. It takes a special kind of person to do that type of thing.”

Scammers tend to regard virtually everyone else as “bit players in the ongoing performance that keep their fraud afloat,” Branscum added. “It defines them all. They’re all the same way.”

Usually, the same huge ego that that serves as the foundation for financial frauds tends to lead to the downfall of those frauds, and usually in under three years, according to the experts.

Madoff, Nadel and Stanford serve as glaring exceptions to this typical model, however, as all are believed to have operated their frauds for a decade or more.

Talented scammers have a distinct edge over their victims, the experts say.

“They’re more perfect as a survivor machines because they’re not held back by the things that would hold the rest of us back -- conscience and remorse,” said Branscum.