Bitcoin Forum

Currently many ICOs are out side and there are 50%-50% is scam.
Investors should bear in mind following key elements discussed in this post to avoid throw money through the window.

1. Team Composition
2. Bitcointalk.org Thread
3. Stage of the project and VC investments
4. Community and Media
5. What do they need the token for? Is the blockchain necessary?
6. Unlimited / Hard cap
7. Token distribution – when and how
8. Evaluating the Whitepaper
9. Quality of the code – Meet Github
10. The Bottom Line

here is my ICOs invest keys experiences... feel free to advice me your idea for evaluate which ICOs are good to invest.

You should consider the ICO's product/services which should have some use in real life,check the founder's and developer's background they should have a previous successful projects do they have capability,roadmap must be clearly stated,the community's feedback or support these are some basic points you need to check before investing any of these ICOs because most of them are created just to raise funds and eventually run away from their investors.

- Oops i was missing important keys.. thanks for your advice. check the founder's and developer's background are increable idea  ;)

Recent scam icos show that team doesn't matter much unless there are some real stars in it. Scammers now create fake linkedin profiles for team members.

I would ad idea and its potential to develop.

Thank you for the info and suggestions. Very helpful for early planning before investing

I think that's important stuff. Given now many projects are less convincing. Usually I only see some things from the project before investing, because only a few that I know. Maybe what you say will be very useful to me before investing in a project. and indeed I've experienced a loss in a project.

Thanks for you advice and I feel more confident.

Let me be sceptical about all of these investigation that we are meant to do before entering an ICO.

1º.- A good scammer can also be algo programmar and website developer and do a great website
2º.- A good scammer can also buy likes/comment/followers for their social media
3º.- A good scammer can also give a great support in social medial, being educate and replying all the questions
4º.- A good scammer can also create fake profiles in linkedin
5º.- A good scammer can have great knowledge of social engineering for make us all believe in his project.

...Create newslatters, have some other scammers as team, etc.

My sad conclusion.. there is no guarantee that an ICO dont be an scam.  :( :( :(

Saying more;
Imagine a project X of renewal energy, sound good isn't it?
Are you conscient that ALL the variables unknown for us?
You think that you can assure the success of that project only because "renewal energies sound good the future"?

The truth is that we as inverstor usually don't know what we are supporting, no matter how much we try to learn from the project

Yes, working product is most important in my opinion which ico should have before doing crowdsale.
No working product, mostly they 50:50 scam or legit. To avoid scam ico, working product is good reference to check before doing investment.

Right on the point, why dont we have a 3rd party verifying company who can go down, meet the team, see the project, do the due diligence etc?
Or any other idea on this?

I think you should pay attention to their market potential, because if they go to the market is not very hard to boom.

All right. This list of actions will help you to protect yourself. But it's important to remember that even this can not completely protect you from scammers, or failed companies.

The points from OP are good and can help one before investing in ICO. But sadly nowadays, they  may not even guarantee you that an ICO is legit or scam.
I have seen some so called legit with real dev team members and great community but when they get on exchanges, they claim that they were hacked by someone and stole their funds and investors lose their money because the token price crashes beyond recovery level...lolzz..very weird.

I wonder how an ICO that raised big amount of money can't invest significant part of the money in top notch security for their project

This is a good list. But also be careful with companies around which there is too much hype. This can lead to audits and investigations, which will reveal that all the facts were clearly embellished.

A good list, personally the amount of whitelisted or people with interests is also important for more. Therefore I pay attention for ICOs with a huge hard cap.

Lots of huge ICO don't have bitcointalk annotation thread. Don't think that telegram will have any threads here) Especially bounty)

Exactly! Track record is always good to consider before investing. Or having at least a prototype that would be important

Yeah for me it's definitely the working product as well. In fact, that's what I look for nowadays in a ICO. Also a great way to detect scam ICOs and ICOs that actually know what they're doing.

Before investing in an initial coin offering it is important that you joined the social media channels offered by the company with the ICO these social media channels are often Reddit and telegram where you can interact with their teams and polish your understanding about the cryptocurrency without any other unnecessary information providing a good understanding of the project.

All of that is true. All those aspects needs to be considered when investing in an ICO.
You also have to learn the basics in cryptoworld before you invest in a project.
Consider all the informations you learn in everything about crypto before investing

for me, nothing's more important on every ICOs is their social network communities because I do believe that every ICO and projects must have a very strong social networking communities like Telegram Channels.
We could tell more differences on how Telegram Channels do best support for every ICOs,
therefore, Im staying away from ICOs or project that has weak or less active members and admins because there's higher chances that they're scam and frauds.

In recent years, venture capital in Russia has become difficult and expensive. In this situation, the ICO for many founders of start-ups is a more convenient way to attract investment.

So the number of channel and group members is an indication of the seriousness of an ICO  ??? ??? ???

What's the exact reason of why it became difficult and expensive?