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2. Anonymous project.

If you want to scam people, best way to do it is by hiding your identity. Therefore you should never trust a project that does not display it’s team members, company information nor physical address. No matter how good the project seems, there is a reason why they are hiding their identity.

This isnt always the case, I have always felt suspicious of ICOs when they link to the team members linkedin profile. Well, this may be legit in many cases as they want to build a positive trust by showing off the team. But, I also have seen people buying 20-25 old linkedin accounts through this forum.

Sometimes, not anonymous team members ICO are also scams. And some anonymous ICO were not scams.
You can't really know if an ICO is a scam or not until at least 1 year.

Actually, there was one project that showed even the personal address of its owner. Sadly, it was still a scam. It's best to check past projects of these devs and their communities to be sure.

What you need to do is trust your instinct and always always invest only what can you afford to lose or else if you got carried away with your greed you'll end up getting scammed and no one here can help you.

This is quite right. If the team members are seemingly there, that's no guarantee the project is legit. They could be fake personas. Just look at the website of the fake howeycoins ICO (https://www.howeycoins.com/index.html) recently created by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The team seems to be listed (even though without Linkedin accounts or any other details), but of course the identities are fake.

It's hard to know cause at the moment there are a lot of scam ICOs use fake identity for dev team member or they use identity of other famous people to make up for their project :)).
It's really hard to detect which projectt is scam at the moment IMO :).

There are many ways to spot red spots, i will give recent example of hashcard, who tried to push things and raise more and more funds and for that they announced that Binance has confirmed their listing which many believed and invested in hope gor gains but the experienced know that no established exchange confirms any ico coin and when people contacted binance they termed it as fraud and announced that this is not true, now hash card project is in disarray and the chances of refund for investors are very less.

Yes it's possible to buy fake account and scam people that way, this is why you should dig a bit deeper and check if they have any other social media profiles, or other online presence.

But anonymous team is still a very clear sign of a scam. Perhaps of a bad scam, since they didn't even bother to buy those fake accounts, but still a scam.

I don't agree with "8. Homogenous team" at all.
Most of the solid chinese and russian projects only have chinese or russian team. Close countries tend to have domestic members.
And sometimes a really homogenous team seems suspicious to me, this is not benetton this is crypto world. Yes a big project with a high market cap should have a homogeneous team, should appeal everyone around the world. But a small cap normal project doesn't have to be especially at the begininng

But they could hide their identity and act as someone else.
Buying and selling identities is common.
Then it's hard to find out who really stands behind the project.

I can't come up with any reason why one should do anonymous ICO, unless you plan to scam people. Honest businessmen don't need to hide their identity.

Most of them are.

Even the assumed trusted developers are also being exposed as scam, just review some of it from the past.

But in the same breathe if you are collecting a large raise, I doubt you would want everybody to know who did that. I would only reveal my identity if I didn't have control of the funds, because I would fear getting kidnapped every single day.

Like I said the article:

It's not always a red flag, I'm just skeptical in this case, and perhaps would do more research.

Yeah, that's a great article. But I will tell you that 90 percent Russian  ICO is  scam , so try to avoid them.

Really? Oh my a so many russian ico,i see lot of them so active and try to scam,but not all scammer.Let me just say  its hard to know who is the scam ico,at first they active after few month they run

Any digital goods can really be bought online which these kind of circumstances on where Linkedin account can really be bought too this is why we cant still assure that they are legit ones. Scammer or shady ICO nowdays becomes too more professional even on my experience after all these years im still able to deceived by a fake project, which if you tried to check out all indication looks legit team,project,roadmap,wp and other related things but it still ends up to be a scam.

Do you know what is best way to spot scammy icos? You should just look into developer team. Many good icos have great team members and links to their profiles on facebook & linkedin. This is enough..

it is going more and more hard to spot scammy ICOs bcoz earlier they use to scam with fake profiles and pics .
now they comes up with everything real but without any experience and vision , just they give bonus and pay youtubers for videos and create fake hype .
people buy those and later find team do nothing serious to that project .

so we need not to spot scammy ico , change the strategy . we need to spot best icos with expert team members , known face of blockchain industry , known youtubers giving review of those . top scorer in spreadsheet of all ICO experts , real project with something different from competitors , etc .

Anonymous isn't good for those ICOs, thats what the team should have in mind. If they keep themselves anon then maybe its better to just invest when the token they are selling to you are already in the market or if they have proved themselves to be developing the project well. It doesn't matter if you buy the tokens for a higher price so long as you aren't scammed.

That's a nice read. I would also recommend to check if the Telegram or Discord group only has been grown with bounty asks or if it was organic.

And if there is a real team with real founders. Good due dilligence is the key to long term success.

you can request for other means of identity if other means of communication is not provided. You can contact through others social media identity and check the record or track records and friends.

This line isnt advisable and its too risky if the project wont go well in longer runs.

It doesn't matter if you buy the tokens for a higher price so long as you aren't scammed.

It feels like you had been scammed if you bought high then the price went down yet you would still lose money but still much better since you do still had money left unlike on scam where all of your money will fly away.

Not whitepaper, project, website.... For sure.. If the team is anonymous, that project is very likely to be scam more than 80% possibility to me. I would not even invest in many projects just team seems not good.

Many people dont want to list their name for regulatory reasons.

today, even the ICO team's identity can be very easy to forge. my advice if indeed the team is really serious in the process, they should still update even have their own youtube account that promote and provide the latest update about the project from ICO or maybe some ICO video review will be more great.

Unknown/fraudulent team members/advisors
It is important to do due diligence on the team members and advisors by fact checking their credentials through third party sources and whether the team members have the capability to deliver the product as promised through their past experiences.

The scam ICO is if the team not post they real faces , because they scared to scam people if they post their faces because people will hunt that team. But as of now even the ICO who faces team are scam people they did not scared of what happen. It depends only to you how choose ICO. Because most of the ICO are scam.

Even though this isn't always the case, it is still important to let the target market know what type of people they are dealing with, whether they have good credentials or not. I would not personally choose a project that has no transparency because that is very risky. Primarily because if anything goes wrong, I do not know who's accountable and anyone who is hiding under anonymous name probably don't want to be liable of any misaligned events.

In general, it is still difficult to distinguish good ico from scammy ico. That’s why most people trust in the coins on exchange(for example Binance or Bitfinex) more.

I don't think it's easy to find out scam ICO at the moment. Scammer is coming more and more professional day by day so it's really hard to detect scam ICO projects if you're not a professional investor :). If you think check WP, dev team and roadmap can help you find them out, I think you're totally wrong cause all these things can be faked really easy.

Whatever anyone will say about knowing how to spot scammy ICO, is definitely based on personal views. Sometimes the project you think is the right one with comprehensive details about the team behind it will turn out to be scam, while the reverse might be the case. So my candid advice is, if any one feels a project is worth investing on he or she should go ahead.

I'm a bounty hunter and I noted some ICO's that turned out to be scam. They have something in common, I can't remember seeing their team's faces on my ads for them on facebook and twitter. Not even a video that shows events of them live.

There are different things who you can check. First of all is it important to know if it is listed on ico review websites. If it is you can go to the next step and check the whitepaper of the project. After that if you are still interested and they can perhaps show you a MVP, check the team and advisors. If all the parameters are ok then you can choose to invest in the ICO.

Is there a way to detect scam ICOs and good ones?

The team behind the cryptocurrency must be completely transparent about their identities and have no history of fraud or scamming.
Are they the fork of an existing coin? If yes,what is the reaction of the existing community to it and does the coin actually make any considerable improvements?

Very good article!

Red flag for me :
1. Developer never shows up on the public blockchain event.
2. Developer did not keep their words. I know start up company sometimes passed the dateline but if there is no progress we can check like at github its a redflag for me too.
3. The project looked impossible to achieve and we need to do dip research when we see very fancy website. Sometimes fancy website is the bait.

This is really helpful for every investor, specially when you are newbie and start to invest in some ICO. Most of scam ICO nowadays are very common, you can easily spot them. Specially on their team members and hard capped or soft capped. So, be careful always.

Thats right! It all starts with the team, and its the first thing to check when choosing an ICO. Most of the shady ICO's has a vague team, like made up names and unknown faces which doesnt seem to be existing. Legit ICO's has a team's resume transparent for everyone.
But investing in ICO doesnt only have the risks of being scam, but it also has the risks of failure.

This is good thread to help people not to become victim of scammer project since they are rampant this years

But what im more concern is your trust history ,its not reliable to listen from someone not trusted,but i respect this post as i have check and find out whats the concern,or maybe advertisement of that said site

Basically you can easily determine if their mechanism states a very ambitious promise, I mean most of then sounds really rewarding which is you can really imagine putting a 50 to 100 usd = to lambo thing. When you technically feel this feeling upon looking it's platform. Well you can easily determine that this is a scam, no need for you to waste time to check upon websites and their group honestly speaking. But you really wanna check go do it and figure it out, it's your own risk by the way.

Here is another good write up:

https://medium.com/@VerifiedICOs/look-out-for-these-things-before-investing-in-an-ico-b60408103425

anonymous team members is the first thing everyone check for before putting any money in any ICO but it's difficult to tell unless you put some time and effort in researching, but that's what you should be doing anyway before putting your money anywhere.

Unfortunately though there are just people investing to ICO without the team's profile. But then some weren't scam even when there is no team's ID too.
Some projects just have fake linkedin profiles and anyone can tell whether the project can possibly be materialized. One thing that I always look for to see to it that it isn't a scam is when the team involves with known individuals and reputable companies behind it.

Thank you op for this information as it will go along way in resolving most of the ways these scammers do used to scam innocent  investors of they hard earning money. I think we should not take the issues of scammers and hackers lightly as many investors has stopped investing into cryptocurrencies because of they activities.

Often these programs scam they have what if we notice we will realize that the content they build is very simple, the picture is fuzzy or fake, kissing again they do not understand much about the area that they cry call the investment