Bitcoin Forum

All of us who is familiar with crypto, saw a lot of scams that stole a lot of money from investors. In this topic I will try to describe how easy it is for scammers to create a fake ICO.

1. Website: Any scammer can buy a very good looking template here. https://themeforest.net/search/ico ($40-80)

Domain + Hosting ($200)

2. Whitepaper: Scammers can order a quite decent whitepaper on fiverr for $500 https://www.fiverr.com/search/gigs?acmpl=1&utf8=%E2%9C%93&source=top-bar&locale=en&search_in=everywhere&query=ico%20whitepaper&search-autocomplete-available=true&search-autocomplete-type=suggest&search-autocomplete-position=0

3. Token and crowdsale contracts: Scammers can do that without any programming knowledge by using Artemine https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2153950.0 http://artemine.org/ ($100)

4. ANN design https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2784850.0 ($250) There are more services like this.

5. Advertising on YouTube Decent crypto channels will charge  $1500 - 4000 for a good review.

6. Bounty campaign manager $200-250 a week.

7. Team mebers. Scammers can hire some unknown dudes with just a lot of followers by promising them a share from their ICO or they can fake LinkedIn profiles via boosting services https://www.linkedjetpack.com/ ($800 for a 4 fake profiles)

8. Alt accounts for bumping the treads Scammers are buying accounts in Russian board "Goods" where you can buy any account starting from Juniors and finishing with Legendary members. Junior member account costs 1000 rubles ($16) So 20 accounts that are more than  enough for thread bumping will cost $320. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2682694.0 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=4445925.0

9. Shilling services Shilling services are cheap. $1 per post for juniors and members and $ 2 for higher ranks. So scammers can afford a army of paid shills . The problem is that shills are from India; Pakistan; Russia e.t.c.... That dudes are using google translate or just copying the posts from other threads. Anyone can hire them via telegram. That service is mainly used by scammers for bumping their threads or for shilling. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2879512.0;all

So any fucking idiot can spend around $7000 - 8000 and then steal millions from people.

Please fell free to add anything to list.

You did some good work on the OP however this is the wrong board for the topic. It does not belong to Meta. Please move it to an appropriate board.

Where shell I move it ? It does not belong to scam accusations board as well. The only board I can move this is Beginners & Help https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=39.0

I think $7000-$8000 is an overestimation... I know very little about ico's and how ico scammers work, but i do know quite a bit about hosting, themes and finding cheap prices for services.

1) you can find stolen themes from themeforest all over the web, i'm pretty sure you can find one of the themes you're looking for for $10 or less. There is no need to assume a scammer won't scam themeforest (or an other template site)
$10

1.b) hosting starts from just $2/month (you're not looking for top notch VPS hosting, a shared hosting provider will do) + domain ($10/year)... So domain + hosting => $50/year
$10 + $50 = $60

2) i don't think there is a need for an original whitepaper, there is no reason to assume a scammer won't plagiarise somebody else's work, but if they want unique work, it might cost them $500
$60 + $500 = $560

3) i don't have any knowledge about how much token and crowdsale contract writers charge, so $100 seems realistic
$560 + $100 = $660

4) the first search i did for ann designers on this forum dug up a guy asking ~$150 in BTC for reasonably looking designs... I won't post links to his thread to discourage others from using this info
$660 + $150 = $810

5) i haven't got any experience with advertising on youtube, so your statement of $1500 to $4000 might be correct. Let's take the average at $3250
$810 + $3250 = $4060

6) $200 for a campaign manager seems steep, since i see so many of those guys asking for work, but let's assume they do ask for $200/week
$4060 + $200 = $4260

7) i've never seen those profiles for sale, but let's assume a 4-pack costs ~$800
$4260 + $800 = $5060

So, my estimation an ico scammer can set everything up for ~$5k, if he's willing to to part of the job himself, cheat other people, pay people in his shittokens instead of BTC/ETH, he can probably get away with waaaay less (i'm thinking in the $3k-$3.5k range).

Bottom line: as soon as i see the word ICO on a webpage, i usually close the tab and walk away...

Eventough i think $7k-$8k is an overestimation, i fully agree with the point you're trying to make, and i love the fact that you've taken the time and effort trying to help other people :)

Thank you, I'm designing signatures, in the past, I thought the design of the website would help me to know if the investment/ICO was real or scam but lately I discovered that some of the signatures I designed were for scam ICO.
Now I'm learning more ways to make sure the project is real "Check out developers and track them", thanks for expanding my horizons

I am not so sure about the Beginners & Help board too. May be, let's wait for mods/more community suggestions to find a proper board for it.

Since it is an ICO related article,can we have them at the altcoin service discussion board? which can be helpful for the newbie investors who are looking to do ICO investment.

Scammers are using Private domains and hostings wit SSL certificate to make the website good looking. That's why I mentioned higher price


Thanks a lot. I added point 8 and 9 (Alt accounts for bumping the treads and Shilling services)

I know i'm preaching to the choir and we're both in agreement that an ICO scammer only needs a very limited budget to launch an ICO, and that's the main point of your thread, but i do wanted to mention that i I only pay $8.99 for my .com domains, whois privacy included. I either get my SSL certificates from cloudflare (in case no sensitive data is exchanged between my visitors and my server) or i get a free certifiate from letsencrypt.
If i buy my domains in bulk, i even get a discount :)

I think it is not fit on any board hence it may fir on meta (current one), beginners and help also on scam accusation as these 3 has few similarities with the thread.

A great way to further check a site/coin to see if it is legitimate or not is to reverse-image search the team involved on the "About" or "Team" pages. A lot (most) of the times with scam ICO's, these images are stolen from the web from a simple Google search, usually from stock photo sites. I've found a few ICO sites that have used stolen images for their 'Team' sections, and reporting my findings has surely saved a few potential investors from dumping their hard earned money into the scam coins.

And as @mocacinno has said, you could make a company appear to be legitimate for much less than $7000-8000.

Either way, thanks for taking the time to outline this; I'm not sure if Meta is the proper board for this. Possibly Beginners & Help or Altcoin Discussion would be your best bet?

The author is well written. You can also add the creation of logos in the form of a competition. Scams are becoming more and more and it's not happy. I apologize for my English.

This is great. You could also clone an open source coin with masternodes, talk about how your coin is better because of shorter block times or whatever, then sell each masternode for a 'discounted' early adopter 50% off for only 0.5 BTC each.

Also, you could have anonymous team members because it's a 'privacy-oriented community coin' ;)

It is nice to see well structured warning about how scammers can easily create fake ICOs.  In particular I was surprised that website design is so cheap and can be created easily.  Interesting estimation, good job OP.

On those boards, it will just disappear under loads of other topics.
I think it would look good as a sticky thread on Announcements (Altcoins) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=159.0), but that would be up to mprep (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=profile;u=51173) to arrange.

Nowadays it didn't cost even 100$ for creating ERC20 token on Fiverr, just as low as 20$ from level 1 seller within 2 days.(Scammers now even can get listed their scam tokens in etherdelta within that 20$ budget)
 creating ethereum ERC20 token for just 20$ from level 1 seller  (https://www.fiverr.com/piyali115/create-ethereum-erc20-token?context_referrer=search_gigs&context_type=auto&pckg_id=1&pos=1&ref_ctx_id=af9bd5e5-218f-4d37-b3a1-6db535799b5d&funnel=7c68352a-bf48-4f7c-ae54-ba5d3205916)

Don't know why these tech guys can't use their tokenomics knowledge in useful way rather just providing nutrition for scammers to steal money from peoples by selling their knowledge like sellers in pavement. I strongly believed there should be a way to trace the token creater at the first place.

I guess $7k - $8k is a small amount compared to this ICO SCAM (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2548744.0).

According to Finance Magnates (https://www.financemagnates.com/cryptocurrency/news/benebit-ico-scammed-investors-least-2-7-million/), Benebit had spent almost $500,000 on market promotion, but I'm not sure where did they get their calculations and it was the same amount reported on another site.

$7k - $8k of amount to start a scam ICO might give an idea to sc*mbags.

Well, what you said is true but in spite of investing 7-8 k USD, he/she will also need a good brain to pull this scam which wouldn't be worth nowadays because of ICO scams awareness by different people.

Nice topic, well thought out.

I would change the title to ICO scams though.

There is an abundance of scams out there, and I dare say the more profitable ones on average are the fake online stores. They always have an address, usually a website registered within the last few months.

These were big during the climb last year (I can only speak from July onward). The sell was that they had the equipment everyone wanted, and somehow at a reasonable price or even a sale.
This brings me to my biggest rule of thumb for a scam... If it's to good to be true it probably is. (attributed to unknown)


Some of them were so blatant to not even try and hook you with the price they charged a massive mark up, and still ripped you off. I saw a lot of these during my hours hunting for equipment and got really good at identifying them, usually through a google search of the address.

The websites were even spruced up with Live Chat support. They didn't like being asked why they were sharing space with whatever business really owned the storefront. ;D

Others include using Paypal or Ebay to do the dirty work for them with the promise of Cryptos... but I'll stop there as I said there is an abundance.

Yeah. That is one great thing to share mate. I have been scammed once and never repeated that stupidity. I will keep an eye on this and great work. I hope many will be guided when it comes to ICOs.
I regret not having background checks before joining ICOs before. It is hard to trust anyone especially when anonymity is a opportunity for everyone here. Better be that observant or suffer the consequences.


I second to this.  ;D

A good ICO is a rarity. The majority are scams.

A concept or idea would have to exceptional to warrant a successful ICO.

Even some of the ICO's with a decent concept are overvalued.

As an investor you need to look for value for what you are paying as well as quality.

It is relatively easy to make $ on any ICO or crypto launch but if it results in eventual bagholders I'm not interested.

There is simply no sense in exchanging good BTC for a token or alt unless it is an absolutely exceptional project.

A jargon loaded whitepaper or shills spamming "good project" are immediate warning signs.

Or you could just pay $4 to buy 1 Waves and launch your own token to distribute in your fake ICO. now I can see why people say Waves is for scammers. they have reduced the cost of scamming down to $4. ;)