Bitcoin Forum

With the rise of ICOs, greedy individuals have found the perfect opportunity to scam crypto and ICO investors. How do you think we should collaborate to identify scammers and stop them?

Unfortunately, any investment is always a risky business, and fraud in this case will always be.

For our part, we can conduct our own research of the project and especially the team, their past experience, reputation, advisors, look at the availability of the MVP and so on. We are unlikely to succeed in unambiguous fraudsters identification, but sometimes it's better to trust the intuition and avoid risk if something causes fear. Personal contact, if possible, can also be useful.

What we can do everything together - and already do - to share experience (successful and unsuccessful) of cooperation with existing teams, to warn and form lists of questionable campaigns, to communicate in order to keep abreast of the current situation on the market.

One of the factors I use to identify SCAM ICOs is that scammers never show their faces. So if a project doesn't have a Youtube channel where you can see the team members I would skip it. The other clear evidence of SCAM is fake accounts in Linkedin. So always thoroughly check a project's team before investing.

If they do not have a real product so that we can sense their intentions or the team is unknown to anyone and does not have experience in crypto-currencies, or it's newcomers then you should not trust this project at all.

For me, first personal opinion on a scam project I would say, that it begins from posting in a  social media and reacting in telegram

It's hard to find out scam ICO project at the moment beside I think there is no way to stop them scamming other people cause after you find out their ICO project scam then they'll create another one and keep scamming people the same as before. I can suggest that if you don't know how to detect good and scam project, you shouldn't become an ICO investor :)

One good signal that the project is not a scam - all amount collected on ICO is distributed through escrow. This is not the only signal, but it always works - there is no need to scam just because they will not get money, all of them will be rewarded.
And pay attention to such things as team, their experience, their ability to speak in public, look through github. And of course read whitepaper. If wp consist of only promises without any numbers - this may be not the best investment.

Assume every ICO as a scam till they prove otherwise.

If they stay in the business long enough, the chances are very low for them to be a scam, but this also might be a preparation for a bigger scam. You really can't exactly know which is scam and which is not until you personally know the lead team. Even this might be deceiving.

Simply by research before throwing your money away at projects which promise nothing. Then do background checks on the team-If you can find no information about them or their "company" online, they are most likely scammers