Bitcoin Forum

Hi guys,

There is a lot of talk about ICO scams. I'm curious about specific examples. Care to share your ICO investor horror story?

Thanks!

I can't really call any of my investments a horror story since I've gained way way more than I invested in them;  But you do come across ICO's that turn out to be nothing.  For me now SGG (stuffgogo) is the worst.  The dev left, nowhere to be seen, no product, no market, no nothing and no reason to believe that anything will happen.  And still I hodl!  Luckily I didn't invest more than $300...  But even if you buy some scam coin, NEVER sell.  I once had a shitload of AMMO, turned out to be a scam but I left before that was official with profit, then I sold my final batch for 30ish sats.  Now the community has taken it over and it goes up again.  THAT can happen too... :)

I invested last July in couple of ICO that are scams.Thats when i started with crypto but atleast i invested little bit.
I still have those coins in my ether wallet and i dont know how to delete them if its possible but now i research ICOs deeply

I invested in some dodgy coins in my times but weirdly the ones your most suspicious of can turn out alright. Originally substratum comms were abysmal and token distribution even worst. Now look at them, they been one of my biggest earners. I also turned a profit on stuff like Targetcoin which I don't think is going anywhere but ICO price was below what they went on market for so bailed on that quickly. Only one I really lost anything on so far is ATBcoin and Kickcoin. Not scams as such just overpriced during ICO.

As I can remember, one of that I got scammed was mass network. Being scammes is really a horror story ;D

Thanks for your input, everyone!

There are many ways investors can get scammed.
First are those scam projects, case in mind Benebit. These are outright scams. ICObench even gave Benebit a high rating, now ICObench has learned its lesson and require all team members to submit kyc in order to be listed on ICObench.
Second is social engineering. There are a lot of fake profiles, fake website, fake twitter account, fake telegram channel that are scamming the unaware. So make sure you check these are the official channels.

Just to clarify, this thread is not an attempt to paint ICOs in a negative way. I just want to collect some cases and examine what could've been done in those particular projects to protect token buyers.

Maybe this should go in scam accusation thread?

Well, I can say there is one that just recently happened, as in the last couple days.
Here are the red flags:

-Company proclaims to be building a smart contract platform that can handle 1 million transactions per second (mind you, this has been attempted by the absolute best of engineers and coders in the crypto world but hasn't been achieved)

-Company says they have an MVP, it is just a website with some strange thing about how it is certified to be philosophically possible.  wtf?

-Company does a presale at a MASSIVE discount, like 80% bonus.

-Company says they won't do the ICO until an alpha is released and people can look at the code on github and test it out.  Alpha is delayed, ICO is delayed.  New ICO date comes closer but no sign of Alpha.  Just three days before the ICO they say that the alpha will be released the SAME day the ICO goes live.

-Company has a whitelist that never closes and isn't even a whitelist.  There is no verification, no kyc no anything.  The maximum individual contribution amount goes from .3eth to .5eth, then suddenly on the day of the ico the whitelist is thrown out the window, anyone can contribute and individual cap is a whopping 9eth.

-People start testing code and alpha, it just doesn't even work.  Like it isn't even functional.  By the time evidence that the alpha is not functional at all gets around, the ICO has already managed to sell out.

Crazy yeah?  This one was credits ico.
(I probably am off on some of the numbers)

Sorry, but how you can say that kick is a scam? Their last updates very important for the future ico campaigns , don't you think so? As I see they make the progress step by step. Unfortunately, we can't get everything in one moment, when we want to wait it. I think they should realize potential of the kickico in near future.  

I have not invested in any ICO that turned out to be a scam as such, but I do feel I have been mistreated as an investor in Ripio Credit Network and WAX by getting the tokens distributed very late and loose the first days of market.

Mine and the only one was Decloud ICO two year ago, it ended being a scam when people findout that they photoshop one of the image they posted on their partnership with one of the German banks, I think the guy disappeared with over 200BTC then, which now worth over $2 million in todays valuation.