Bitcoin Forum

A simple search could save a lot of money from the scammer.

For investors and bounty hunters, I will suggest visiting Scam Accusation (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0) board before joining any bounty or before invest on ICO.

You could also find scam ICO from Guidelines, how to spot a scam ICO & report effectively (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5004397.0) by yourself to help the community.

Eventually is you are much busy than simply you can use Google search. Since Bitcointalk is a good ranking on Google, you will find easily if there is any scam accusation. And a lot of scam exposer active on bitcointalk lately. I will give example how to search.

For example you want to join bounty or invest on Metiercoin (https://metiercoin.com/) ICO. Just you have to type on google search "Metiercoin Bitcointalk" then you will see below page.



Is it not really easy to find scam ICO? By searching this way you can save your money.

Good advice. Well, it prevent from being scammed only this ICO is already busted and scam accusation against it was started.
If not, you should make deep research about ICO before investing. It would be good to use suggestions posted in your thread "Guidelines, how to spot a scam ICO & report effectively" when you're making research. You need to put effort and time to find as more information as possible. You must know where you're investing. Otherwise this investment will be just a waste of money.

LMFAO, this guy talking about helping others to not get scammed is promoting a Yobit signature!!! Yobit is one of the shadiest scam exchanges around.  They steal money from users by selective scamming large amounts, they have lots of accusations against them.

I made a search with yobit keyword  :P

https://i.imgur.com/TkqfGNP.png

Really funny but on the other hand this is not the best exchange and I know several examples when they consciously lured users to buy fraudulent tokens that pump&dump in a matter of hours. Os some truth is here for real.

Sadly, there are still users who doesn't know how to search. This tutorial is much of a spoon fed but its not followed by an individual who is in a hurry thinking the 20% bonus token as an early bird investor is worth. Somehow investing on tokens listed on exchange is a better option if you don't want to be scammed. You avoided KYC process from a scammer who also collect your data.

Even just by going to the last page of the ANN threads of both their ICO sale and their bounty campaign you will see a lot of members warning other members that the ICO is a scam. Other members are actually helping other members not to be one of the victims by the the developers and also preventing them not to waste their time on participating in a scammer's bounty campaign that will most likely not pay. But unfortunately a lot of members (particularly the lower ranked members) are still falling into these kinds of trap as they don't wander out of the first page or even read other posts before theirs.

One more indicator that a project is a scam may be the absence of negative feedback on its media sources - no project is flawless, 0 negative comments may speak for the fact that community managers are actively deleting compromising stuff.
That`s another point to look for, although very time consuming.

Agreed. Getting listed on exchanges is also a good indicator if the project is scam or not. After all, exchanges do initial analysis before listing, otherwise I may hurt their reputation.

Not all scam ICO could be search on googles for there are some projects that are actually legit but in the end they will going to be marked as scam project. There are many reasons for this but the scamming activities has one thing in common  and that is the necessity which money could provide. The contributions among the investors would be most likely to be owned by the members of the team who were doing and introducing the ICO project. Thus, taking the money of the investors and run away. The worst scenario for some is that the ICO project was able to reach its hard cap but the people behind the project are running away and taking their money.

This is an example of running away with the money of the contributors or investors,
Reference: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/11/21/confido-ico-exit-scam-founders-run-away-with-375k.html

https://i.imgur.com/cgyNONV.jpg

This is the real reason why one should be extra cautious in investing or contributing ICO projects. I know that many of the projects that are coherently marked as scam. Yet, contributing in ICO projects are profitable so we could not blame why one should join and contribute on it. There are good projects with great team and it is a responsibility to look for them carefully and take some time before one could decide to contribute or not.

This is one good way to reduce your risk of getting scammed although you still can be scammed even after adopting this method but it would be necessary to employ ever available good measure to save guard yourself from getting scammed

OP, I'm curious, how many ICO projects have you reviewed that are NOT scams or shittokens that die after 6 months?

I think we are at the point when the only "succesful" ICO's are those that attract millions of dollars in investments, so people have then have years to sell their coins/tokens with profit. But even them will probably fall at some point, I'm talking about projects like TRON or EOS, they are all competing with each other and I don't think that there's enough space on this market for them all to survive.

Everyone can find a lot of ICO scam projects here
https://deadcoins.com/
https://imgur.com/a/RiYNTc9
Also see more here
1. https://tokentops.com/ico/scam/
2. https://icoindex.com/index/scam
3. https://bl4nkcode.info/scam/crypto-list/
4. http://www.coinscamlist.com/

Run your own investigation and collect information from different sources.
Don't rely on third party reviews they may be misleading, they usually get paid to post positive reviews about scam projects.
Some managers pay bounty hunters to bump their project listed on thoese websites.

note: deadcoins don't list running ICOs.

What I usually do is enter site:bitcointalk.org metiercoin (for this example). Google will then search bitcointalk.org for threads about metiercoin. This is also an easy way to find the ANN or Bounty page of a project you might be interested in.

Here is the result:

https://talkimg.com/images/2023/11/12/zAsWb.png

You can’t always trust Google search results. Google my name for example, and you get a bunch of bogus scam threads started by trolls. However, when it comes to ICOs, you don’t even need to do a Google search to know they aren’t going to make any money.

Thanks for sharing.. but the fact remains that not all scan ICOs would be posted in that section because some look so legit in the beginning.

I agree that google and Bitcointalk have a wealth of information on the crypto space and scams.  It’s simply amazing that many people still fail to do a simple search to find more information on an ICO.  I have seen friends blindly invest in an ICO simply because it has a wildly fantasy idea.  Turns out to be a dead project. 

Yes, I have saved thousands of dollars just because I did some research before taking an investment decision. Even if you won't find the topic about any new xyz coin, project or scheme, anyone can simply ask the senior and experienced members of this forum as they are always ready and happy to help us. I have always believed that investing time before investing money is the wise option because it not only saves our money but we get to know much more information about the ecosystem around us and latest good or bad trends taking place in it.

That's true and it should be highlighted that not finding dirt on something doesn't automatically mean it's legit, but people should still search all the same. Not all scams are easy to detect, but some precaution is better than no precaution at all. If you fail to find info on something, it'll be up to your better judgement to determine whether it will be worthwhile or not. Is it too good to be true? Is it even viable? Sometimes you have to reach your own conclusion because everyone else could be blinded by promised returns.

Or just don't invest in ICO's for a decade or two  ::)

They aren't investment opportunities as much as scammers want people to believe they are. Until there is some regulation on the ownership of companies like and shareholders rights through ICO's (their aren't any currently), these it is best to stay away from.

Some pretend it's an unregulated stock market, which allows for partial ownership of a company. Initial Coin Offers are just non-refundable, zero ownership rights tokens to represent something a "team" plans to build. Whether they build anything or even have a good idea are vague at best with most of these.

It's a great way for people who can't raise money through IPO's, banks or venture capital to pretend they will start something and basically steal people's bitcoin.

At this point people should consider all ICO's as scams - they have been such for a long time already, and at this point even newbies realize that. They start to resemble hyips in many ways, investors know that it's a scam, and still they invest because they hope that they can sell before the project goes bust, just like with ponzi schemes. But this is a bad idea, because the only winners are the scammers who print coins out of thin air.

This is true most of the time. YOu cannot blame ICO though. You can blame people for being so stupid they can't google before investing. It is alwyas like they do not like their money or did not work ver yhard for it or something. How many hours of work do they put in to make that money and they cannot even take a minute to google something. No sorry I feel nothing for these people. An ICO is still a great way to raise money for things and if the company does carry on like it should your tokens will carry value if it's shit then the company will die or even never exist. This is why you should only invest in an ICO you can see progress with and they have something to show for it or at least they are trying. Copy paste ICO are not worth wasting time on.

What are you trying to say? Just because someone falls victim of scam, doesn't make him or her stupid. Some legit ICO's ends up becoming scam at the end. Not everyone has the idea to google a project first before investing.