Bitcoin Forum

I see a lot of fake ICOs that are on this forum and have taken a lot of casualties.
many investors lose their money.
they offer tempting benefits but in the end they cheat and it's clearly against the law.
how can they get away with this forum and this will make crypto electability destroyed.
sometimes I ask whether there is a legal legal umbrella to protect investors where they complain and whether there are legal sanctions for those fraudsters.
and I want to see your opinions and solutions about this.

This is unlikely unpredictable in the case of people that are just joining blindly for a good come back of money, Aside from the whitepaper I really think that researching the developer and the management team thoroughly was a good thing to do, And the ability of scammers was way on a level that even the veteran bounty hunters can not assume that it is just a scam and not legit for them because they may use fake ID's of people that are well-known in the industry, So to speak there are just ICO that is legit and true to their investors but suddenly need to pull out their ICO because of not reaching the hard cap or soft cap of their project, So we can not really assume any ICO can be a 100% reassurance of a success.

ICO investments has become such a huge risk that only few investors are willing to take.
Every project just make promises of a better future oh the blockchain technology with a glowing whitepaper and road map, and sadly there is no sector to ensure they keep to their promises, as some are exit scammers. This is one of the reasons regulation is necessary.

I am also interested in the answer to this question. As far as I know, people who lead fraudulent projects generally have problems with the law on financial fraud, they are tried, imprisoned, and so on. But what to do when I am 100% sure that the project is scam. To complain?

You most likely don't have an authority to complain to and your money might not come back because I don't see any regulation yet.

What you can do if you suspect or sure, is to raise a thread on scam accusation board, here... https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0

You are right but there are different kind of cheaters, for example some of them launch a project simply with the intention of scamming, some intentionally keep delaying the progress and development and doing so drops the investor confidence and their token looses value, some are just poor projects with no practical use cases or market so such projects fail with them and the team and investors slowly accept that they are going no where so the project comes to a halt, i think all these are different types of cheatings where the investors are always at loss, there should be some regulatory framework where investors can be refunded if the project is found to be falling in any of above cheat categories.

well
interesting
as far i know ,
forum have no special actions about such things.
of course on forum have special person to judging something like that,
but , u know , since a millions ico come ,
its very hard to finding them one by one.
btw, dont judge to forum, because that not 100% mistake from forum
actually the point about it just from investor self, i guess.
research and research before joining , about profit ,
we can talk if their project success,

The solution is strict rules, regulations and registration and kyc of each and every ico and the people behind these projects and also ico funds in some third party regulator so that in case of scam or fail remaining funds can be returned to investors.

well
u mean the team also must registration of their data ?
sounds good,
but to who data must be given ?
lets say to third party, and the question ,
who the third party ?
must be super people
well
I think the simple of this solution its using DAICO system.
but i little suprises,big project never using that system,
i just know ABYSS so far.

There was no solution because there was no any regulation that regulated the development of icos. remember all of these money are holding directly by these icos creators. As far as i know the fact that if there was a project that change its roadmap and it can be considered as a scam dude.
So many project has been doing this thing.

I do not blame the forum and instead I invite you to find the best solution for the progress of this forum and the crypto world.

It is necessary to develop a system of reliability , which will allow to exclude a number of unfair projects from the list of investors, will save our money and trust to the scheme of ICO. Perhaps it will be a KYC for projects, in which the project representative must register himself before posting announcements about the project on this forum and conduct their ICO.

This is the problem we are having in this industry, ICO is not regulated and there is no legal backing for it. This why an investor must be very careful before investing his hard earned money in thin air.

There is no protection and there are no sanctions which is why they call it the wild wild west. People invest at their own risk, even if the ICO project team are unverified. Entrade is a verified company so you can invest there with confidence

I trust ICO's WhitePaper only if I know some people in the developers or leading team and their abilities. If I don't know anybody in the team I skip project and don't read WhitePaper because there are too many scam ICOs now.

Yes, it can be changed according to the rising os funds. If the investors and community weak the project can be totally dead. so if your going to join Ico  you must find a better project  

I think everyone hopes like that, but it is not an easy thing, we all still have difficulties in detecting ICO scams earlier and the law for criminals about crypto currency is still very minimal, and this is what criminals use to gain profits from crypto currency, believe everyone hopes like that, and I'm sure there will someday be a security revolution against crypto currency business

It seems to me that the documentation provided by the developers must be paid attention in two ways, since we must be sure of the accuracy of the information provided by the developers of the project.

every whitepaper what I read impress me, it so promissing and perfect, but reality is not so good in 90 % times

There are ICOS that is registered by SEC. If the investors itself take care of minimizing the risks then they can considered those ICOs who are on these regulations. If case of a failed one, those projects are bound to returned the money of their investors because that is part of the law.

But in reality, investors are just throwing away money without proper research. In case of scam, they are left with lots of question in their head.

The team behinde the project are much more important to me than the white because even scammers can come up with solid white paper.It is very important to pay attention to the team and research them.Law or no law,scammers will always exist.

I also have this idea. In this context, it always seemed strange to me why they require KYC from investors and bounty hunters. In the end, they have no active influence on the project. At the same time, the responsible public person of the project can be a guarantee for investors.

sometimes what they show on the whitepaper seems redundant and not everything they do in detail and accordingly, it is unfortunate indeed, but not all ico like that

This is already a risk for experienced investors to ICO. There are no legal entities that address this because in track scammers are not something that is easy to do. a good analysis will help keep from ICO hauled off a scam. Perhaps if there is an escrow it will be better because when would be a bridge if it met in the scam.

They only make cryptocurrency bad, and they will lose their chance in the future. Many people now are afraid to get lost from the ICO, and it seems, they are waiting for something new before they reinvest. Yes, they can get away with easy especially if they can get much money from the investor but I am sure that they will get what they did before and I hope that they can get something bad that will happen for their life. I am sure that there will be a law to protect the investors so they can feel safe to invest their money.

just like heaven and earth, where the whitepaper is a dream that has never been achieved and that is the reality that happens today. for now there are no regulators that can guarantee an ico and provide guarantees to investors. this is indeed a dilemma and often takes a lot of victims, I think this forum has been very thorough and always provides interesting discussion or knowledge. there are many ico scams revealed, whether by moderators, DT members, or other users in this forum, of course in this case we cannot be alone to fight it and we must work together to eradicate it.

This forum is a great opportunity to see if an ICO is scam. There are a lot of great community members, that are identifying scam ICOs and posting about it here on Bitcointalk. But usually nobody read these posts. Be more selective guys.

I think your subject is different from the body of the post
Whitepaper is the supposed plan or view of the reality we are to expect and it means a lot
If the project duly works out you get to the desired destination of the project

As a so called investor, you should be able to identify fake whitepapers or stolen whitepapers
Always do your own research

In whitepaper they tell very much about their products, their vision but until now i don't see any project provide exactly what they described in their whitepaper yet.

Scams are not moderated in this forum so we need to be careful about the scams but we have a section to report those scam projects where we can find almost all the scam projects running our forum so people to to have a habit of visiting that board if they are bounty hunters and ICO projects which will be really helpful for them.

Crypto is indeed a very promising and even being too promising thus is used as a method of scammers to get profit. many of the ICO is indeed a scam, and it always exists between it. have escrow I think that could be said to be safe and also need a lot of analysis to determine whether this is good and not to follow.

No legal protection exists if the company is not located in the USA. So many ISO frauds just because investors are stupid and defenseless, they have no one to help.
And the name of the topic needs to be changed:  between white paper and reality there is a abyss)))))

Almost no ICO nowadays has a product, at least an MVP. It is normal, that ICOs are writing a whitepaper, open up a community and start to collect funds already. We need to see more working products from the top 100 coins.

I think there is no solution for this problem unfortunately. There are so many new ANN threads with scam tokens, it is simple impossible to keep track and moderate all of them. But we should at least try to delete or tag confirmed scam threads, so new users will be aware and won't invest any money.

We can not know which one will cheat on us for 100%. Be selective and very carefull before choosing any of that.

Absolutley you are right but this issue is really complex to understand and solve. I think that bigest work is on us in this issue because ıf we search a lot things about these icos like you are saying, We can decide which is trustable or scam.

It is very unfortunate that it happened in a number of ICOs, I only recommend that choosing ICOs choose by reading the Whitepaper and seeing the people behind the project. There are several ICO projects that already have legal entities, such things that can be considered by investors

well, i also saw so many scam project with very well prepared whitepaper. so whitepaper is not my reference anymore. i check team more. team must be known, real and popular people. and they should be accessible as well.

I strongly agree not to blame the forum because the forum is only for discussion,
the problem of an ICO is fake because of the lack of investigation of someone who
jumped in the ICO, as if he would invest carefully he would not fall on a fake ICO.

I think that if crowdsales will remain decentralized we will see a lot of scam projects again and again. We need more centralization for quality control like it is in Kickstarter. Decentralization is good for payments but is not so good for investments.

The advantage of cryptocurrencies in the absence of legal regulation by anyone. If you introduce legal regulation, you will pay taxes and you will be controlled in every way. The whole meaning of cryptocurrency decentralization will be lost. Just learn to distinguish good projects from SCAMS.

Whitepaper is not a really expensive thing, everyone can buy this for 100-200$ with good quality, in my opinion that is wrong way, how u can discover ico scam or not.

The growing number of scam projects has made it even difficult to differentiate real ICOs from scam. This is a growing problem for the crypto community and also damaging to this unique fund raising model. Crpto-community should come up with a way to mitigate this, Personally I see Mfchain as one ico that will stand the test of time and present value to it investors. Every good investor should do their home work before investing.

i have been warning about this for a long time now. some people think looking at the project, its whitepaper, the website, even seeing the pictures of developers automatically means the project is legit! but the fact is all of those things are publicity stuns. some projects actually pay others to write their paper for them! it is like a job now "white-paper-writer"...
and in the end it is all done to take that money from you in the name of ICO and give you some useless tokens in return which continue to decline as everyone dumps them.

In many countries there are no such laws to protect cryptoinvestors. Maybe in Usa sec it is trying to regulate the ico market, but many simply go to other jurisdictions, for example, to Malta. No one gives a full guarantee of security of funds if entered into the ico project. But you can somehow reduce the risks of using companies with escrow. For example, the daox protocol where investors decide themselves what to pay for the project team for further development.

i think it's up to us and investors to check carefully everything about the project, the team or a coin. after all we are responsible for our money. and it's our problem if we can't spend some time for investigation

You can always rely on team that already delivered their promises in some other projects. There are a lot of experts in different project out there. Creator of EOS was blockchain engineer for STEEM so it was obvious success.

The whole point of cryptocurrency being Decentralised has made it difficult or almost impossible to cramp down on scammers since most of them hide under anonymity or use fake identity. Moreover in most jurisdiction there is no laid down rule govering ICOs so basically you can prosecute them.

I had the opportunity to review many ICO projects. All projects have many promises on their whitepapers. And most of them don't make real these sayings in any way. Therefore, I don't even follow projects that don't present a real product or service.

There is really no guarantee what you are going into I have seen so many ICO with good rating but failed to deliver the goods not even a good whitepaper can guaranty success, it's easy to create a good whitepaper today because there are services that can do that for you, creating an ICO has become so easy than three years ago.

First, i would say that our destinies are in our hands. The onus is on us to always research every project we intend investing in.
Do not invest because a project is promising your some bonuses o anything attractive.

Confused too sometime  whitepaper is too good to realize, even with roadmap i never see good thing with the token itself when already in market. But as long we already know it, maybe now we can learn from that thing to pick which is good ico that we can invest.

Yes, it is true. Check every ICO carefully, most important is to check team! Team is producing ideas and needs knowledge, so if no knowledge you can be sure it will be no good project or a scam if team is fake. Double check at linkedin and for google pictures. Some are using fake pictures from google.

Yes, if every team member stays anonymous you'll never find anyone and nobody can make a prison judgement. It's always important to check team.

If you can caught frausters it can end in jail.

Anonymity and no strong legal or laws that do protects investors is the main reason why these scams do pop out everynow and then. They can take millions without being traced
specially on anonymous owners/team.This is why its always been important to check things first before putting funds. Whitepaper isn't a sureball thing for you to rely on even no matter how good
it is, tendency of success and failures will always vary on how the team develops it.

Anybody who thinks a whitepaper is even close to what the final product will be is delusional. I think Bitcoin and Ethereum are probably the only whitepapers that actually truly reflect the product. Most whitepapers just embellish the details and add a crapload of hyperbole in there just to grab as much investment as they can.

I am pretty sure that if you compare the predictions made in a whitepaper, with the actual products of all the most recent ICOs, you will find that at least 98% of them are outright fabrications and not even close to what is feasible.

in this forum there is no official legal umbrella that can protect investors from failure or fraud ico, I see a lot of investors feel disappointed when investing in ico but do not get profit, this can be used as learning if whitepapper can not be used as the main reason for choosing ico that, many things are more important to be used as one of the benchmarks for choosing ico.

As you know the government has no complete control of cryptocurrency. That is why most people try to scam other people with fake ICO. It's really not that difficult to make one, some scam ICOs just copy other legitimate projects' whitepaper. It is sometimes investors fault that they easily get attracted on ICOs just because it promises good returns.

Investors in cryptoworld can not be protected due meaning of word "crypto". Today in whitepaper team can write what ever they wish. We must analyse all information conserning project

Before wasting any time on the project always check the team first and verify information on team members if possible and then take other research steps.

Your subject isn't appropriate with your main post. However, reality is totally different from whitepaper. Most of ICO are just copy pasting or plagiarizing from others lately. And almost ICO are same concept. So there is no chance they will follow whitepapers. I have caught lots of ICO with fake team and plagiarized whitepaper. That's the reason people's are discourage to invest on ICO. It will never end. Every day coming new scammers. Solution is just avoid buy token during ICO. You will able to buy more cheap from exchange if they list. If you would like to invest than you have investigate deeply. Not just see website and decide to invest. But better option is avoid ICO.

I think this is a market of belief. So the risk is very high in investing in ICO projects. It is very difficult to find a great project. The best way to get a good project is to attend the ICO meeting. Good projects usually have face-to-face meetings and that makes it possible for investors to ask questions directly and to create great confidence for many investors.

The topic is misleading to its content. I will answer based on what I have read on your post.
As I research on scam ICO's, I was able to determine that no one got caught and the law does not apply to those scammers. Maybe there are people who got caught but not reported, I am not sure but if there are only few people are paying for what they have done, more and more acammers will just keep on creating scam ICO's.

The solution is easy: stop giving money to these crappy ICOs. This way they will die off eventually. By this September, ICOs funding has reached a new low and that's great. I believe ICO will not be popular anymore in a year or two.

For investors who only pay attention to the whitepaper, it is possible to be fooled, that is why it is recommended to research further until the development of the project, most fooled investors only see so many bonuses given without thinking using common sense. Crypto is a choice between trust or disbelief.

Crypto's are decentralized so that's why there's no legality that's under it unless the country that the project will be operating requires it.

Your title looks far from what you want to say but in ICO world, you really can't tell in the earliest what's legit and fake. But most of them are scam and fake.

not all ico cheat investor or bounty participant. but many of them cheat us.
how clever we are to choice which ico have good potential and have good future. and whitepaper can be your line but it can be very useful to help you which one is real or scam. just try your luck with your brain

Are you a journalist? Very provocative title of the topic. White paper and reality, in many companies, do not touch.

By now people should understand that Whitepaper is a marketing tool, can anyone compare the whitepaper of Bitcoin to any of the recent ICOs, Whitepaper should be more of technical details unlike what we are seeing now that all its talks about is about marketing pitch. People need to wise up or these people will continue to scam you

That's the problem, people don't know this. They expect that that a whitepaper is a prediction of the future, rather than an absolute best case scenario which very few projects actually manage to attain. The whitepaper is very unimportant now, the main thing is actually the team composition and experience.

The main thing that the team wanted to do something and she had opportunities for it. You can write what you want in white paper, but not everyone can imagine a good finished product.

Casualties should always have themselves to blame most of the time as they failed to do proper due diligence before deciding to actually invest in the first place. That is one problem we have always had in this space, people who tend not to want to do the needful to at least be careful of what they are getting into before eventually getting into it.

For anyone who wants to face reality, they should understand that whitepapers can be cloned and with that being said, what is important is to always check out the team as well as MVP before even making an attempt to go reading some whitepaper.

Yes exactly that is really big problem for crypto community but we are not trying to see something important.
If these regulations will come to crypto we cannot make 10x 5x in one day anymore.
Crypto space is really risky and because of that we can find a chance to earn money 5x in one day.
People always complaining about scams etc or they want regulations etc..
If you want secure place if you want regulations go to stock exchange bro. They are really regulated and guaranteed and stable and safe etc etc.
Why we are here. Because crypto is really risky but if we will find a good coin a good gem we can earn too much money from here.
That is the main issue in crypto space. So  you need to learn how you can detect scam icos. You need to teach yourself and you need to gain
experience about that issues. after that i believe you will stop complaining about scams. Yeah too many investors losing money. i also lost too much money.
but i am not complaining why. because i gained too much experienced from my loses... and after some time i feel like pro now. I even cant invest any scam ico
anymore because i feel that scammy smell when i entered their websites. so the time is stop complaining and start learning and being professional in that space.

White paper is needed to attract investors as much as possible. Therefore, there is painted as if the project will never be more successful. In our time, and half of the written is not observed, because it is impossible. You need to really look at things

I think there should be an undertaking by any project trying to use the forum for ICO promotion to guarantee that if the project fails that fund will be returned to the investors and the project owners must be physically identified not anonymous. They will proof that they are ready for the project with some evidence and this meeting will be at a place where the forum representative and the project team will meat physically and the documents signed before such project will be admitted into bitcointalk.org forum  for promotion.

Reading whitepapers is very important to us for all investors and bounty hunters to know the project perfectly and no one can earn a real money if they joining lots of ico with not getting know it.

But it doesn't mean the project can reach the success in a long time because it will need more effort from the team to hard work in their project. But whitepaper can help them, the investors and the bounty hunters to know if this is the good project or not. Besides the whitepaper, they need to know the details about the project so they can determine later. Unfortunately, right now, it is hard to choose the right project because every ICO still on the progress to finish their project and sometimes, they need more time to give something to the investors and the bounty hunters.

Forums such as this one are very helpful and informative. It's not the forum's fault if there were scam ICOs here. It's the people who decide where and when to invest. Now, it should be the part of the investors to make due diligence. In the case of regulating these ICOs, I'm really looking forward to it just like what Australian government trying to impose. In that at least regulations would somehow filter the list.

As long as cryptocurrency is illegal in your country the police cannot help you with it.  There is no legal basis for it unfortunately :)

I do not invite you to blame each other.
but there is a point that must be the main focus, that is if more and more ico fraud, then crypto electability will go down and it is certainly something unpleasant.
I am sure everyone here is hoping for Crypto to move forward. and things like no ordinary thing no one has never been deceived, therefore I invite you to find a solution not a debate.

You know, I've already followed a lot of projects. I can tell you with confidence that many projects forget about white paper immediately after the ICO.

Flashy white papers and website, as usual, a common practice from ICO's but the real problem is the actual content and the output that they will produce base on their roadmap the problem is most of the projects right now are extending due to lack of collection to token sale, I saw some ICO's scammers getting away from their project like nothing, project team member must do a KYC to show their authentication so if ever they are going to scam someone it is easy to track and to give sanctions to those people, however, they need to do submit it physically, I think that's possible.

Unfortunately, expectations about the project are usually not met. Every project wants to tell beautifully what a grandiose plan they have and how they will become popular, but they don’t want to do anything, or they don’t know how, or they are just scammers. The whole situation around the expectations of the project and reality is well reflected in this picture:
 https://i.postimg.cc/75CNkmpq/photo-2018-07-07-18-21-58.jpg (https://postimg.cc/75CNkmpq)

Of course, there is a very big gap in this, because many projects are really very much and very essentially cannot do as they are written in white paper, I am sure that today many people still understand this.

It is hard to do a background check at this time that tons of ICO exist. Sometimes it is better to know if the company really exist or if they have working products that they risk to sustain their credibility.

yes it must be admitted that the results of the whitepaper and the reality that occurred after the sale differ 180 degrees. it seems that only 20% of the total ICOs are available for 1 year. but actually there are also those who run according to the whitepaper, but the problem is that they are in the market position which is already quite severe. so that it seems that the price does not support it back even if the roadmap on the whitepaper runs perfectly

actually the legal umbrella for fraud either in investment or in others. it's just that we have difficulty implementing it in this forum. because each other investors do not know each other. and the only one who can help us as deceived investors is the admin and team in this forum.

As much as it is a great opportunity, a lot of people do not always get to dig deeper. The information is always going to be there to take advantage of, so it depends on each individual how ready they are to utilizing that information for their own benefit.

Asides from getting information from this forum, another imperative thing to always do is to be able to do proper due diligence on one's own which is one thing I believe that as long as you are able to do that, the chances of being scammed will always be slim but because a lot of people are always lazy to do this, it is always easy for scammers to have their way.

White paper is nothing more than a detailed technical aspect of the project that is going to be implemented and that includes idea and expectation, the reality could sometimes far off from that so called whitepaper
but atleast the project is trying what it can deliver except they are lacking of commitment of the result turned out to be far from what people expected

well this is good to be a discussion, but until now we can't do anything about the scam ico. only state authorities can take action on it ...
we are well aware that regulation must exist to be a counterweight to ico. it's just that this requires cooperation between each country, especially about its legality. this is difficult

It is very difficult to protect investors. When the investment is completely voluntary. We must remember that, cryptocurrency is born for a quick transaction, it will not verify your identity.

Indeed, the whitepaper is made as attractive as possible to be able to take the hearts of investors and the public, so that they can decide to join and participate in it. So to get one really is not as easy as making a whitepaper.

I just don't have a trust tot whitepaper. In my opinion, you can match real facts and whitepaper, but your decisions must go from yourself.

I think we really need to work towards reality
Most whitepapers promise heaven and earth only to crash out after a successful ico

But to be honest
We can detect good projects from their whitepaper
All we need to do is discover what type of product they have to offer us

We cannot detect scam projects or other frauds, all this has become a risk that must be taken. As investors, they know better what to do if they see this. This is the advantage of the scammers in Crypto, no one knows with his malicious account. All come together as one without a clear identity, but surely you use your thoughts and understanding to things that are better and useful, every action must have wisdom and risks.

There are those scammers that are behind bars now but sad to say that not all have been punished. We are in the crypto world where we can hide our identity that is why some abuses this attribute. Anonymous but they can be traced if we really want scammers to be punished for the crime they committed.

Warning! User Qiuyue201 is using stolen account!

Cancel all his bounties etc.!


Hello, scammer.

You stole my account. I am reporting this form now on to all the bounties you are attemptimg to participate in (but I am doing it at the last of the bounty so you have to work for nothing). Also reporting to all the prevoiuos bounties that ended and you were not paid for them yet. Also reporting to Bitcointalk administration that you are using my stolen account. This is second time it happened to me. Not sure if you were last time or someone else, but this time I am asking them to ban all your accouints if you have any multi accounts.

Thank you for all. who have given your thoughts to progress together.
indeed every job in this world there must be a risk only the purpose of our community is to remind each other and interact with each other to move forward together.

Not all crypto currencies can stay the same from the idea period to actually end of roadmap. I do not think ethereum was first created as the "ICO King" coin neither but after it got divided into two the eth we have became the the eth we know and many coins started out their ICO systems thru ethereum blockchain which made a lot of people buy ethereum to get into the new ICOs and eventually make it worthwhile.

That's the good example, there are lot of coins that started as "x" but turned into "y" along the way like that too, some end up as great, some end up as horrible. We can't judge the roadmap from whitepaper, life changes constantly, so does coins.

Unfortunately there is body yet to protect investors from those scam ICOs, except for some SEC compliant ICOs, where investors are fully protected.
We are in a system where most times, investors should know how to identify and be able to distinguish between scam and genuine ICOs.

The market is mostly unregulated so it is going to be impossible to offer some kind of solution about this, people can get away with all of those scams not only because of the lack of regulation but also because most of them never revealed the real identity because they use fake pictures and names to promote their ico, so any attempt to find them is going to be a lot more difficult because you do not know who they are.

I have not yet met a single project where there would be no deviations in the fulfillment of obligations from white paper. The main thing that developers can honestly admit about it and fix their mistakes.

What is written in the WP is not guarantee that it will be realized in real life. It depends on the development team
if they are capable and experienced enough to fulfill the project promises.

In every whitepaper in the ico most of the investors got attracted in it because of the road map they to their project program. Then, most of them too after

their ico finish the token price its not yet happen in the actual price value once their token has been listed in the exchange in terms of reality.

Funny, this is really a very funny situation. Especially if in white paper everything was so colorfully painted, but in fact just some kind of calculator, then this is certainly ridiculous, because it looks more like a scam project. But still today scam should be severely punished ..

Every investor should have different strategy to analyze the right ICO for investing. However, most of them will see the whitepaper. It includes the very completed concepts, token, team, and everything about the project. If everything is clearly stated and explained in the whitepaper, it seems that this is good enough for a project. But of course, WP is not the only one element that we must consider. Think much on their real team, community, wallet, and many more.

Last few months we have seen dramatic increase that many of the ICO did not want to listing any exchanges, even its written in road map. They sell tokens to the investors and keep them pushing buying more tokens. Discounted token prizes now is just a lie. Private investors buying the token with really high bonuses and its easy to sell their tokens half of the real ICO prize.
Moreover even they need softcap for development of the project they choose to run the project without having enough money collected. That is all means years and years to develop the project, listing a proper exchange. Rules must be changed or less and less ICO will able to be a real crypto project.

Whitepaper  affects people's decision investing with any projects, problem with that is when the developers are not really after with progress but only for benefits, even they wrote a good target progress without any development coming from the team there's nothing special that will happen to the project
most of the time when the coin got listed automatically the value got dumped and investors loses their money selling out of panic losing the entire investment.

the basis of a project is a whitepaper. the problem is the reality that occurs after they distribute coins and proceed to the market list. here is not explained in the whitepaper how their next strategy is to at least maintain the initial price. they don't promise anything and it sucks.

There are many facts that are different from the whitepaper, partners should be involved in funding able to inhibit the wave of large-scale sales, I doubt their capabilities and as seen only as a document sweetener, actually not involved at all post-coins enter the market.

I prefer to communicate critically directly with the developer before following it.

Some countries do provide legal protection against frauds in crypto market, but not every country. The reason is that most of the governments have already issued a circular or article against investing in ICO or the disadvantages of going in cryptos. Since, cryptos are decentralized and at most anonymous. It becomes tough to crack down the scammers in the market. We as investors should do proper research and take precautions before making an investment in ICOs.

I believe a whitepaper is really worth to learn, but we can't just blindly believe on the project that opening an ICO, cause doing that will makes us suffer from the other condition of the market itself.

whitepaper can copy from another project, this doesn't really matter. Complete documents are indeed a basic need. but the activeness of developers in promoting their projects is also very necessary, I prefer the second factor. The most important thing is personal analysis where the project is able to adapt to market possibilities, many projects are unreasonable and too impossible to develop, I am still skeptical of VR technology projects and their relation to market reaction, they will definitely be trapped in the middle of the road without clarity .

This is something that people have learned the hard way, it is very easy to get excited about a project after reading the white paper, but it has been a constant that the developers of the project do not really make an effort to try to fulfill the promises that they made in the white paper, I think this is one of the reasons of why people are no longer reading white papers because there is not a point to do it.

If the developers of project are known (which I doubt) then I think they might be charged with fraud. If not then there is no legal possibility to punish them I think. Whom you gonna punish if you don't know who is behind this project? I think we just should be more careful.

The Whitepaper can often end up being a best case scenario for the project rather than a cast iron certainty. It is obviously the best place to start when you are researching a project but it needs to be combined with a fully capable and experienced team with a sound business track record.

That's a good question.
I have already tried to analyze the work of ICO and proposed to carry out the procedure of KYC for the founders of projects and ICO, it would significantly reduce the number of fake ICO and protect the interests of investors. But opinions are divided because of the issue of anonymity in cryptocurrencies.
Unfortunately, white paper with a good technical analysis can not guarantee the performance of the project obligations to investors and the return of funds in case of failure of ICO.
In many cases, permission from regulatory authorities is a high degree of support for projects, approval by the state or other government agencies is credible to investors, but such projects are units.
Now many crypto investors are puzzled by the search for good projects, with a guarantee of profit or return of their funds, so the reduction of fake projects is our big task.

As of now there is no clear regulation regarding ICO but every nation or government have their own laws regard fraudulent activities. It would be hard for the law enforcers to prosecute them because ICO is not yet covered in their regulation.

this is one of the issues that we have as an industry where people will outline nice plans to entice investors and get their money and after raising the funds through the Ico project, more than half of these project cannot even accomplish even half of what they have in the whitepaper. Sometimes I really wonder why that is happening.I ask myself where the money they raised went to. This industry needs so many structures to be put in place if we are going to move forward and achieve more as we all look for mainstream adoption of the blockchain.

When we talk about regulation of cryptocurrencies, most of the people don't like it as they know it against the main purpose of cryptocurrencies. But according to the high number of scam ICOs, they must be regulated. A group of people who want to hold an ICO, must be qualified for that. Why should it be that easy to hold an ICO and scam people?
If that happens, people will only invest in ICOs that have been verified. Otherwise, its their own fault.

This is a big problem for us actually. There are several types of scams. Some can be exposed immediately, they usually have gross violations that can be detected. Some are prepared more carefully, even after the ICO ends can continue the imaginary activity, so as not to cause suspicion. But also do not forget about the projects, which all went well, but for some reason the team was unable to achieve its goals and therefore the project was dying. Unfortunately there are no sanctions against them and we will not be able to complain. We just have to be careful.

Its shame how commonplace this has become, most of the Whitepaper we see around are only cosmetic makeup good enough to be washed out at the end of the day. Many projects set unrealistic target in their Whitepaper, their intention is only to raise money and nothing more. At the end the Whitepaper becomes useless, it's very bad I must say.

As the cryptocurrency by nothing and nobody is regulated, and fraud prospers here. I wouldn't know who have agreed to moderate projects. And in general as they can be selected initially not perhaps with an accuracy to tell the project good or the swindler.

As I know, now there are many new projects to protect the investments of investors in new ICO projects, so you can use their services so as not to fall for the scammers.

Yeah I must agree that nowadays people only treat new ICO as  the commodity to make money, most of the coin developers didn't care about the crypto anymore, they make the whitepaper seems like so promising and set unrealistic value, and when the fund is enough they will run away, but since this is decentralised world so nothing could be done, we only could rely on ourselves to make a good decision when we want to invest in ICO

There have been no official laws about it and of course, this becomes a risk for many investors. even knowing this scam only when it is entered in the forums and because of thanks to the analysis. When the secure escrow should probably find info on ICO who at least could be trusted on a situation that is indeed full of scam is this time.

If all those scam project can't be stopped or at least reduced, there will be possibilities that no people will have their trust on cryptocurrency project anymore. If there is no regulation on everyone who wish to start a new project that opening an ICO, it could be hard to filter the validity on every created project.

I believed whitepaper is one of the most important documents when running the ICO.  Even how good and well details the whitepaper if it can't fulfill in the right time then it is useless. Look at most of the ICO now there are full of promises, they have expert team members and they are also verified members but they struggle too much because the content of their whitepaper are really hard to adopt in the real world. in our current situation it is realy hard to determined potential ICO. They can even use ICO as a legal way scam.

you know, this question is really painful lately. we can't catch them by the hand doing their tricks but for heaven's sake, we live in a digital world, why can't we just track them down and bann?

Personally I pay attention to the White Paper and try to make the analysis how much the idea in the project is real. Very often some WPs look like the one pager or double the information from the website, so you can not find new details there. Very often you may find the good project with a strong idea and good WP, but according to some circumstances the team does not work and develop their idea and looses its popularity and just disappear from the market. So strong WP is not the first point I pay attention to, but is among all those poins in the list as for me.

You are absolutely right that most projects are just making promises to do this or that according to a rather blurry roadmap. In fact, most of these promises are either being cancelled or postponed (e.g. they promised to list the token in November, but "due to severe market conditions" listing will take place in May next year, so investors are basically loosing their money and time).
The solution of the problem could be the availability of a working test product for any project that wants to start its ICO. Yes, in this case the developers will have to work for no money for some time before the necessary funds are collected, but at least they will present the actual implementation of the idea that lies under the project that can persuade the investors to believe their promises.

unfortunately, there are no sanctions for such scams. as soon as the sanctions are imposed, I think there will be much less scams in the field of cryptocurrency

Currently, there is no such protection that would allow people to feel comfortable after they invested in one of the new projects. The only thing that can protect you qualitatively is your personal awareness and professionalism.

 agree with you, at the moment I see many ICOs that offer many benefits, but in the end only scams and fakes. The whitepaper that has been made is sometimes not in accordance with reality, at this time I rarely invest in the ICO especially if the project does not have an exchange. I am more interested in investing in a project if the project has been registered in the exchange