Bitcoin Forum

According to this news I read, is this the end of of ICO? Kindly read through and give your opinion
The cryptocurrency industry may be maturing, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to shed its reputation as a playground for scam artists anytime soon.
That’s according to a report from Diar, which found that ICO exit scams have now cost investors nearly $100 million.
The majority of these stolen funds, an estimated $68 million, has been raked in by exit scams that have occurred during the first two weeks of August. The largest, allegedly pulled by the China-based Shenzhen Puyin Blockchain Group, raised $60 million from three separate ICOs before attracting the attention of the State Market Regulatory Administration (SMRA)
n another particularly morbid exit scam, the organizers of Block Broker, an ICO intended to fund the development of a platform that would “completely eliminate ICO fraud” exit scammed investors to the tune of $3 million.

In its report, Diar’s researchers attribute the proliferation of exit scams to the structure of the token sale fundraising model, arguing that it creates misaligned incentives.
They wrote:
“Unsurprisingly, the blatant exit scams continue to plague the largely unregulated ICO sector where the founders have no contractual obligation to deliver a product. After raising millions of dollars with no string attached, the founders’ incentives to actually build a valuable company are very limited.”
As Diar notes, the amount of funds lost to ICO exit scams is particularly bizarre considering how easy they are to spot when conducting even a moderate amount of due diligence. Many, for instance, use plagiarized whitepapers and fake profile pictures. One project famously used a picture of Ryan Gosling for its fictional graphic designer, while another featured a fake testimonial attributed to an image of Jennifer Aniston.
Nevertheless, fraudulent projects, including those that use other tactics than straight-up exit scams, continue to attract hundreds of millions of dollars from investors, often by using FOMO to trick them into acting against their better judgment.
Even supposedly above-board projects have used the hoopla around exit scamming to accrue media attention. As CCN reported, one startup — Savedroid, which raised $50 million from its ICO and other funding sources — executed a fake exit scam in a controversial publicity stunt apparently designed to drum up interest in an ICO advisory service that the project was launching.

ICO exit scams have now cost investors idiots nearly $100 million. FTFY.

There is no shortage of scam ICOs because there is no shortage of idiots who are willing to send their money to obviously shady trash. People traded Bitconnect for months after it was blatantly obvious to everyone that it was a pyramid scheme. The majority of ICO threads on this forum have people pointing out their obvious flaws, followed by 100+ newbies ignoring these flaws and posting vacuous nonsense like "great project" and "to the moon". The majority of newbies have no idea what they are investing in, and don't bother to find out.

Until this stream of morons dries up, scam ICOs will continue.

This is sad to see such news. But here the investors are to be blamed because they are the ones who did not do their research and fell into the trap.

No organization can stop these scamers. I think that cryptocurrency legislation is the solution. The market is too chaotic. Everyone wants to swindle money. You can't believe anyone easily.Only by law to sanction them.

That is true and it is either they will learn how to invest wisely or they would just put negative words into the market then put money into a scam again. I would highly recommend that they should learn the in and outs of the ICO s before they reinvest but knowing some of them they already put negative words into the market.

The people knew the do's and don'ts of such scams and yet they proceeded with it. These sort of things should act like a warning for the people in the future to not be reckless.

First we need to know why that "investors" be scammed? Because they didn't have a careful research before invest in that projects, to know clearly information of the team. There is no reason for a project to commit fraud with a well-informed team.

These sort of news about scams are sad to bear and witness. Even though the people are warned about the red flags, they still fall for it and that is saddening.

These are really not good news.
Really a pity that the fraudsters have so much success.
Hopefully the wave of scam icos will eventually stop.
But as long as the fraudsters earn so well, they will probably not disappear.

It will be good to see the link where OP get the information as to where this news are from.


Its true though, we can't just blame the "idiots" who sends money to these projects because even those scam busters were even victimized. Scammers are just becoming very  good at what they are doing that they can persuade people from doing something upon reading their whitepaper..

As long as the investors are behaving like illiterates and being greedy, scam ICOs will never end. Due to the hype created in 2017 many people took the advantage of ICOs to raise money and made their scam exits. Investors didn’t learn much and jumped into crypto for grabbing some quick money and they paid the price for their foolishness.

So what were the top five exit scam icos, i think this post should also list those icos so the community can become aware of such projects and could be more vigilant in investing.

Only 100 mln .I think ICO what already disappear what about all that worthless ico tokens
I will tell you a story about one indie game company sorry don't remember name
They have collected 500$ from Kickstarter after just one month in game exchange was live and running.In comparison MobileGo collected 46 mln$ they delivered esport exchange after more than one year.In game exchange is still just a project
But MobileGo has 100 devs that indie game company just a few

This is so true and sad. And i think the biggest wrong of crypto is this types of Scams and Frauds , they need to be punished. So always stay safe , invest in ico after deep research , this precautions we can take atmost, no way to find lost asset. And i think the amount is much more than ~$100 Million . Everyday we find some news about exit scam.

only regulation of ICO market will reduce the number of scams. as you see many investors are afraid of making investments in ICO because of total fraud.

I agree. The market needs to be regulated, monitored because a lot of the scam projects are covered by crypto currency. I chose a very good project for myself.
I also advise you to pay attention to the company's ICO MPCX is a digital block-driven financial services platform. Our long
term aim is to aggregate all the crypto financial services into one place. MPCX
is designed to serve entities' and individual's needs in the areas of digital
wealth management, cryptocurrency exchange and trading, digital banking,
crypto research and ICO promotion, and crypto lending.
A great opportunity for investors to invest in a new project. This project has a very strong team. I am sure that the whole world will soon find out about this!

This is crazy amount of Money.

And i don't think they are counting envion. Which is a shitshow right now and raised 100m $ only by itself.

How many billions have already been cashed out and put to fun and toys from EOS alone? I imagine that 100 mil metric is quite a conservative estimate...

Pincoin, OneCoin, Bitconnect, Plexcoin, Centratech, Benebit, REcoin, PonziCoin   and many more to add...

it is not idiots always put money in to those scam ICOs, day by day scamers improve their tactics and find the way to trick the investors and collect money and escape,

Many people scam this kind of hope for a lot of time. But I hope all of us who invest in cryptocurrency should analyze about the project and all related issues before any investment.

I think the main problem is the people who invest in project without knowing accurate information about it. Many people think only investing will make them rich. But actually is far more than investment.

this is not a surprise anymore because almost 70℅ of ico today were scam, investors should really have a hard time in researching and investigating the ico before participating in it, dont be rush. always stay alert in every ico that you want to join.

100 million dollars! It's enormous! I haven't idea about this much money. I think strong steps should be taken with this scam projects. Otherwise the amount will be more bigger next time.

All these scams allegations is painting the Cryptos world in a bad light and will reduce the confidence of potential investors, the unavailability of a regulating body to scrutinise all these fraudulent ICOs will have prevented some of these scams, its quite sad to hear that some ICOs ran into thin air after collecting investment funds.

Scams are common in every industry. And in online world it is too much easy to do scams. That's why we are seeing lots of scam ICOs around us. I think we should be really careful about choosing ICO.

i can not really believe that people are stealing so much money, but it seems to be true. somehow icos should be regulated so that something does not happen anymore.

If this true this is very bad news to the crypto world. That is why always be careful in investing money specially fraud project. Just make sure that Team is not fake and they also attending conferences and summit. Good thing also if they have legal document and real office. I hope people will to their own research before they invest money.

#Support Vanig

That's really a huge money, I believe there will still be more than that because there might be some exit scams which might not be recorded, people only notice the exit scam of a popular ICO not really the non popular ones.

Virtual development projects are "scamming" real people and real money. Many people who bring real money to join the ICO but then the developer drowned who does not know who to hold, nor can resell the stock "Token to anyone.

Scam ICO is si called problem in ICO projects now-a-days. Many projects are appeared as scam now-a-days.

Find out promising ICO project is hard now-a-days because there are many scam ICO projects are appeared and that's felt very bad effects on investors.

The popularity of ICO currently looks decreasing because some of fake ICO projects already ruin the reputation of ICO and if we still found scam ICO dominate the market then i'm pretty sure ICO gradually will lack of interest or probably will disappears however regarding the statistics i think possibly the number of amount higher than that

Unfortunately that is true. Because many investors who want to make quick profit without doing some due diligence first.
I think there must be some company that regulate every ICO in blockchain. So they can ensure that the project ICO is real and not a scam.

Sometime ico became scam although have success with ico sale and raised more than 80% token sale, why its happen. Many investors asking about why have scam although success with 80% token sold to the public, more strong reason because we can’t trust the owner of ico projetc.

Such an unsustainable market like cryptocurrency a possibility of any kind of accident occurring. But we should be more careful in this regard so that we can keep our investments safe.

We can avoid these interactions by making more extensive research on the team and their project. Most of the ico nowadays are also filtered already by the SEC ensuring that the possible ico that is scam never gets enter to the tokensale.

Fraud is very detrimental, this is very sad, and must be followed up. ICO is one of the most important points in the crypto world besides trading and mining. This should not happen, but there are indeed many people who are less satisfied with the performance and become ICOs as easy targets for deceiving investors, an evil act and will not be a blessing later.

The popularity is over because ICO is being used to scam out investors and reputation is really being mainly affected and I cant really deny that investors will lack already some interest to make investment because of rampant scammers.This isn't really just the amount being stolen and I would believe this do even involved billions of usd if we do try to see the lots of scam ICO wayback in previous years even upto now.

Nowadays its getting hard to find a good trusted ICO. even you try deep  researches, read the whitepaper, ask other websites, they can still scam you. Because they are getting more and more professional for scamming. Big marketing, professional blogs, payed votes.  Easy million dolar without any responsibility attracts many professional scammers. Everybody needs to take care of his/her hard earned money.

You may want to read this:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/unpacking-the-5-biggest-cryptocurrency-scams

So I still don't know why people are still willing to invest their hard earn money to ICO's. Of course not all ICO are scams but you need to use your common sense and not fall for this kind of trap. Good thing though is that this forum has help unravel a lot of scam ICO from the beginning. You just have to visit the Scam Accusations thread: (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0) before making decisions to invest in any ICO.

  The market needs to be regulated, monitored because a lot of the scam projects are covered by crypto currency. I chose a very good project for myself.
I also advise you to pay attention to the company's ICO MPCX is a digital block-driven financial services platform. Our long
term aim is to aggregate all the crypto financial services into one place. MPCX
is designed to serve entities' and individual's needs in the areas of digital
wealth management, cryptocurrency exchange and trading, digital banking,
crypto research and ICO promotion, and crypto lending.
A great opportunity for investors to invest in a new project. This project has a very strong team. I am sure that the whole world will soon find out about this!

They don't even have to use exit scam and disappear. Most of them just put on their wp "decentralised, private, fast etc" and on the roadmap dates of listing on exchange and thats it. And they collect a lot of money, pay some to be listed on some cheap low vol exchange and they can leave project, and its legal and investors are holding bags of dead coins!

I am sure this set of people has cause a great havoc to a lot of people in the crypto community and the actual amount they have scooped from people might even be more than this. This is an awaking call to everyone that adequate research is important before going into any project.

I hope there could be a regulations to curb scam ICOs but I'm afraid it'll be impossible because of the anonymity of the whole concept of crypto, some people can just come together come up with something or just copy other project's idea and start ICO without the intention of implementing anything, raise money and run with it thereby turning to shitcoin, I just participate in hashrental which is a big exit scam

Be very skeptical of any person who speaks in extremes.
for example, if someone predicts that this year is the end of the ICO, that is just ridiculous and extreme.
The reality of all open and free markets is that it is not zero sum, meaning, it is not just winners and losers.
Gains and losses happen in many different ways and it is very complicated.
Supply and demand fluctuate and the way assets are traded changes also.

So the more realistic thing, is that the current ICO boom will slow down and startups will begin running ICOs in different ways rather than ICOs disappearing all together.
One thing I have noticed already, is that startups are getting more realistic and have started setting hardcaps lower.
Also, I am gradually seeing icos with more products ready instead of just a whitepaper.

And, of course, investors too have wisened up and have stopped throwing money at shit projects.

Scams are only for fooling you and getting some money from you. We should always be cautious when investing to check whether it is a scam or legit. Then we can reduce this sort of amount.

The cryptocurrency industry must be doing something to counteract all of these scams otherwise people will soon be not trusting any project introduced via the ICO platform as they can conclude that any project can be another scam and should be avoided. And I think the lethargic situation on the market right now can be attributed to this factor...investors have already stopped supporting many projects because they are afraid of losing their money to frauds. And we have to remember that majority of investors here are ordinary guys who have not been exposed to  the world of investing and so they can easily fall prey to scams.

ICO scam projects are increasing rapidly as a result many investor losing their interest with ICO project.

Honestly I was expecting a lot more. What constitutes as "stealing" on this scenario ? Is it just the coins that created an ICO and blatantly just took the money left ?

Because, I know couple of coins that have been doing the "look like professional real company" route and still just worthless and horrible coins and still not considered "stealing" because they are not out there saying they took your money and left. The only difference between companies that really stole your money from ICO and the ones who basically stole but never admitted is that one is searched by the law departments and the other is considered a bad investment.

It's unfortunate to observe such figures considering that he himself led one of these bounties and did not receive his tokens!

Really very big money was collected last year, as well as this year and if we look at the fact that today there are opportunities not to choose projects that would simply attract us with pictures, we have become much smarter than we were before.

Scammers are making investors frustrating. Being an investor, it is ones duty to find out on where they are putting their money. They shouldn’t be tempted by only seeing the profit they promise to return.