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I think that this is becoming more and more common lately, so what can we do to ensure that responsible people can be punished?

I think the easiest thing to do is to contact the developers before investing or before you decide to participate in the bounty of this project. You need to contact directly by phone, if it is specified or it is best to go and look at the address indicated on the website, is there really such a company. If this is not possible, but create a theme and ask people to find out if there is such an organization or people.

In general, by any means to identify the identity of these people. As soon as we can add personal identification, these people will not be able to just fool us. Because you can write to them in the police under the article fraud.

The most important thing is that today there is everything necessary in order to really find and punish the people who are deceiving us. I think it's time for us to start doing it, otherwise the ICO may die.

If you have any other suggestions, I will be glad to hear them.

well. good advice. well, the question is whether this crypto has a law? if there is already a law. meaning that this is a great way to eradicate fraudsters ico. Although the process may be quite difficult, such as tracking, but this is good advice in anticipation before the virus spreads. I want to see the deterrent effect for fraudsters ico!

Here, little depends on us, everyone should do his research. I like to contact the directors of the project. If they give me a contact and I can talk, then I do it and then draw conclusions from the conversation. Some are even willing to give a phone number so that you can communicate with the organization. So this is the only way for me at the moment.

Easier said than done. It is really difficult to identify a genuine or fake project. Even if we by any means find and identify any fake project, we can do nothing to prevent them from defrauding others. What we can do is ask our friends or relatives about it, which in face have a less impact. What I am emphasizing is that strict regulations should be in place, which will have a greater impact. And bounty managers should also take initiatives in telling customers or investors about fake projects as they more or less know about the projects they have involved.

I find it very unlikely that you said it, because now I show that too many ICOs are fraudulent, that the number exceeds more than half inside ICO. When deterrence happens to those people, scams fly away, and we will be greatly short of making new, good projects for investors  :o I don't agree with you too.

I don't think it's easy to find them because they will run away to the other place and change their identity. We don't know if their profile in the website is the real identity and they can easily to change the status to someone else. I don't want to call them just to make sure they won't trick us because we are in the online life which we don't know who they are.

We should not risk our money to invest in their project if we cannot accept the risk behind of the investment. I am afraid that is what we will get when we want to invest in any of project, and we must understand that only a few projects that still legit.

Since ICO is a relatively new fundraising mechanism, there is no regulation about it yet. At the moment, before you put your pennies into one of the ICOs, you can only do due diligence about the project and the team. Like OP said, peoples need to start doing research on the person behind the project. Are their identities genuine?
And if you want to really invest big money, you must contact and meet them face to face. That's how it should be done, just like the old time.

Then do your own research so that you won't be deceived by these scammy ICO. You can also visit this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0 - > Scam Accusations to see if the ICO you want to invest has been flag as potential scams but some members here. Yes you can contact the developers and I'm sure that they will answer to you, however, when they exited already they can't be found so that's not a good method as well.

when it comes to ICOs and new projects the developer is the one deceiving you in most cases so there is nobody to contact. besides when we are inside the pre-launch time of the new token the developers and everyone else involved is always going to be extra responsive and kind to you. they will make you feel safe to create that illusion of being a legit and lasting project. and as soon as they receive their payment they will not answer you anymore.
so the solution is simply not to trust the new projects. stick to what has some history so that you can make a better assessment.

Honestly, it doesnt mean anything if you get a contact you can talk with. If a project wants to scam you they will do it. Just invest in projects with real products or a longer lasting history, but this wont save you from tokens which become worthless after the launch, like Savedroid eg.

You offer to contact the developers, but it is almost impossible. I tried to do this in many campaigns and I managed to do it just a couple of times from numerous attempts

“You need to contact directly by phone” ? I don't think they will care you and let you direct contact them, it's not easy to find them because a lot of project team member stay anonymous online and easy to run away when scam exit, maybe I will check the project website information and reading the whitepaper, verify team member social media information to reduce scam.

Its hard to do that since some of the developers are not that approachable and even if we have this one, we can’t still confirm that the project is good. Just try to follow the strategies of some investor, they are just buying ICO after the exchange listing which for me is the safest way to invest on new coins.

hahaha. maybe also they will invite you to the guests and tell you how they plan to develop the campaign. Of course, no one will tell you anything on the phone.

All information about the team is fake. And if you want to contact them, no one will answer you. After they scam, they will disappear with those fake personal information, the scammer is now very smart and you can hardly check them as easily as before

It’s a pity that you don’t want to do this, because I wouldn’t mind finding people, I think that in the future it will be possible to organize some kind of service for identifying developers and only those that will actually be identified, that is, they will actually be confirmed in real life only they can be trusted

Life itself is full of risk,putting your money in ICO is taking risk, even if you have the direct contact of dev or organization, that can be change and they can run away as well if things go wrong.We just have to make necessary research to minimize the risk.

This is a very good idea, but are each project willing to do it ??? before there is a any organization was made to guarantee and select ICO projects, I think this is just an idea, but, I hope, one day this really happens

I wonder who we can report to because a lot of people have decieved others and stolen their money away.  It is quiet difficult to get them punished.

Even if you will contact the directors of that project if they were scammers then the directors will just give you a promise that it's a legit project with a huge future. That's the difference between talking in phone and talking in the crypto events. You just waste your time in contacting them with no guarantee. If the project is legit those directors are busy and why they will give you time just to talk on a bounty hunter or a small time investors. Legit projects have many exposures in various crypto events and those should you consider.

You need to exert more effort and time to get back the money you lose but still there is no guaranteed. The best way that you can do is to forget about that, move-on and learn from that experience. ICO will be more better soon and we can easily see fake projects since the good one will offer a more realistic technology, and with already real products out in the market.

Normally, when I'm deceived, I will be very mad. I know that I have tried my best to get the money and then invest in an ICO. But when  they deceive me, I can only try what I can. However, actually when investing in an ICO, I must be aware that I must be ready for any kind of possibilities. So that is why I must be more and more careful and smarter in choosing the ICO.

Developer will give you promises is very high attitude because we are audiences and built project with out audiences is impossible. This is reality that we should take as risk, not only you fails when decides to invest. Complaint will not solve problems but learn it as experience is better. I'll not teach you about how to become great investor but everything must have limit, include money and psychology. When you see something wrong just go and never came back again.

I think the STO is moving towards stopping that. Yes there are still stuff that we use today that could scam us and we wouldn't be capable of doing nothing. And yes there will be people who are registered with authorities and still scam people and will be sued and put to jail (after they stole our money which is kind of useless for us) but in the end if you could make the things you invest into liable with the securities and SEC than there will be less people trying to scam you.

Think of it like this, right now there are websites with provably fair dice gambling, a lot of them actually, would you go gamble at a place like primedice with trusted management and a provably fair, or would you go gamble somewhere who you haven't heard before and doesn't have provably fair and just uses "trust me" system. Of course you would select the first one.

With time STO will be like that and people will be registered and the punishments of some early scammers from those places will make other scammers stay away from scamming that way as well so it will be only honest people there.

maybe I would suggest action to be applied to myself when we have been deceived. first calm down yourself, don't panic, get angry, or be pessimistic, there are always lessons that can be taken from all events. for the future you must always be more careful, always read information from various sources and analysis before deciding something

If you know fraudsters, maybe you will never do this because it will only make you more confident with all their nonsense offers. There will be no original developer contacts even on their website, maybe only social media profiles that they rarely check. You will always be directed to contact customer service and of course they have been trained to control a conversation.

the best way to prevent ICO project be responsible to bounty participant is made a written contrant for ICO dev and bounty manager regarding bounty participant and put it on bounty thread and also bounty manager should know ICO dev contact person either their real address or passport, so that they will think twice for running from their responsibility to bounty participant.

That will be a good thing for identity verification because in doing so we will know the people who are behind the project and being able to communicate with them directly, and not the decentralized method where everything is behind the scene and with a lots of scams and fraud.

nothing to do. When you're tricked, you have to make money. but make that experience a lesson so you don't be fooled in the future. Remember you have to be careful when you want to do something, because in the crypto world there are many scammers.

So we need to upgrade ourselves about cryptos better if we want to be here for longer period.Its just not a hard technology to understand when we have common sense and little effort before investing on the new projects will do the work and help to identify the scams.

You have made a good point, but my concern is this, this is a decentralized system, how do you then intend to bring these people to book. Then there are also some project team that give out their mobile number on their websites, but us that enough to save investors or even bounty hunters from all those scammers, no. My point is this, until the crypto space is regulated, this might continue.

Depends on the project. I can give an example of the project KYCLegal, which still seems to exist, but it is fraudulent, and if you believe their information, the project has collected about 27 000 000 dollars. And people can neither sell their tokens nor return the money.

What you propose to do is the usual steps in the analysis of the project. Before you start to help the project, you need to get acquainted with the team, with the product that this project is developing or has already developed. Check with all available information. And after that already invest or be a bounty hunter of this project.

I haven't even heard of this project before if they can scam 27 million $, they are really good and smart. But anyway, for scam projects, we will definitely lose money and lose time with it.

nothing to do. there is no protection of the consumer's right to lose or be deceived. that's the biggest weakness in the crypto industry, and always remember the quote "crypto is like a chocolate box that we don't know what it contains".

2 precautions you can take: either 1) Risk only an amount you are comfortable with losing 100% as an ICO investment, and / or

2) Have the means to personally and physically find the owners of the ICO and hold them accountable in case of a scam or gross negligence of their duties and promises...

Those projects whose team are fair and trustworthy enough usually show some proofs. For example by linking their team members social media accounts and by passing KYC on icobench. Usually in this case project won't deceive people.

Your thought is something out of my mind should I call it as "sarcastic". I really don't think this is a right idea as we are risking our self by investing without knowing anything about the person. I personally feel its a waste of time contacting them about the prospectus and all, due to a massive downfall in the market a lot of ICO's are yet to launch its project else they might have started the process already.

ICO nowadays are dying because of multiple scam projects recorded on 2017 and 2018. Crypto investors are also aware that this project are nothing but a trash after a week getting listed to the exchange. I could say that the best option to check if the project is legit or not is to check carefully their team member if they have an active social accounts and if they are willing to show their faces on a video about the project or conferences they participated.

It's very difficult. We all know that laws around crypto are sometimes vague, sometimes non-existent, and vary from country to country. It's very difficult for scammers to be apprehended. The best we can do is thorough research before we get involved with a project.

If you have already been deceived, then it seems to me that you can do a little.  But to prevent this from happening, KYC for project teams would seem to help us!

Yes, the author is right there are many people from different countries and it is possible to create a base of associates who in their area could personally verify that the project exists in reality.

If you are deceived and you sent your money or stolen then you will not do anything in the cryptocurrency , unless of course you know the person who did it then you can personally present, and so you will not do anything

You have a point there to have personal communication with people you invest your money to. But some people because of the attractive promise of big returns get easily deceived and invest without doing deep research about the project. They tend to be trusting in exchange for the promised big rewards. I think this is where regulation comes in useful. Regulating policies in crypto trading would somehow minimize scam project.

First of all, you should inform and warn others about what happened, so that other people would not fall into the same trap as you. Next, find out if there is any possibility to return your funds and punish exchangers.

when I was deceived, maybe what I would do as you mentioned, but I prefer to introspect myself, why can I be fooled and make a note of what made me deceived so that the hope in his situation will not happen again.

I'm astonished, to be honest, that there're few murders and other crimes in this sphere. In some countries and some spheres, people are killed for much smaller sums of money, and there're millions of dollars!

I know that some projects use fake team photo. So it is really useful to find all participants on third-party sites. And check if all is ok.

I do not think that responsible people can be punished especially in our industry. Spend some time by researching any ICO in what you are going to participate in and within some time you would be able to detect scam projects.

What you are offering is unreal. If scammers are smart, then they can cheat on the phone and at the address. You are proposing "to create a theme and ask people to find out if there is such an organization or people." What kind of people? Where to find them? If people don’t invest, they don’t want to know what’s what. As for the managers who lead the projects, they are also not always honest. The main thing is that they are paid for their work, everything else does not bother them. There is one conclusion - fraudulent ICOs thrive on impunity.

Note to all of you here (basing from my experience). Whenever someone directly messages you or send you an email with vast amount of offer, it is mostly scam. Nobody gives free money anymore with all the crises we have from countries to countries. Especially when you are visiting a public chat support of projects, deceivers are just waiting for you and directly sends you a PM asking of your credentials or a wallet address to invest. Block them and better add a comment to that wallet they sent like at etherscan so others may know of their wrong doings.

I always think that if there can be an organization where everyone planning to own a project will have to registered and got an approval from the organization which we investors can also confirm their identity for investing and if there's any issue they will be easy to deal with.

The ICO space is already messed up but still doesn't stop people from falling into web of being deceived. Not all have access to the right information even if they go deep in research. The easy thing is to regulate ICOs.

Maybe everyone all wants to do this but it is impossible because not everywhere and everytime you can do research in reality and contact or identity of leaders are just also relative

cheated? a sure thing if you have been exposed to fraud then you have to further improve the situation in the future. to prevent this from happening again.

You will not be able to do anything, your money will never return to you. What you need to do is to learn from the experience and avoid repeating the next time. Everyone in this market has definitely been cheated at least once

Any developer or project team memeber that want to stay hidden will be stay so,there is little you can do about that ,even if you made calls to some fictitious numbers provided.So your best defence is to avoid investing in projects where you can  see reasonable level of interity or seriousness.As for punitive measures against them,not much unless we have a regulated market

But do not forget that fraudsters are also improving in order to deceive you. I agree with the author of the post that first of all it is better to learn the team and the despicability of the people who are behind the project.

Frandster are many in cryptocurrency world they take opportunity of people and we fell into it because most of us don't know how to identify scammer.

therefore from now on all must be careful to choose the place of investment and the project that we are going to enter, and take the lessons as well what settings we get in deception to us

maybe in the meantime when I was deceived I couldn't do anything, but there were some suggestions from my friends to report it to CIE whether it could work or not. I haven't tried it yet.

I believe scammers will be punished by the law or karma! But the experience has shown that most projects are really aimed at the honest work, but they lose because of many difficulties and conditions of the market

I've been scammed before, it was Titanium.
It was an ICO that started Dec 2017 and reached their hardcap in jan.
Their token hit exchanges and was worth 3x ICO price with high trading volume and demand.
Everything was looking great.
And then, someone hacked in and "stole" the companies funds.
Lots of controversy and unnanswered questions, but they reissured a newly branded token to all hodlers so it seemd ok.
Then, the ceo, Michael Stollery, gets arrested for fraud and the whole thing gets shut down by sec.

Here's the thing, I actually did my due dilligence beforehand.
I actually did reach out and had some conversations with the devs.
Everything seemed to check out.
Sometimes you just really get screwed over no matter how careful you are.

Yeah true. Because many fraud ICO's, investors will afraid and won't come investing and ICO will die someday.
Personally, i think it will be better to make some platform for holding ICO. ICO companies need to submit the KYC of their team.
So, the investors will have a better guarantee that their money won't be scammed because it is the real ICO.

Thank you for your advice. I will try my best to perform this work before investing. But I am convinced that most of the anonymous ICO projects are scams.

Being scammed is really painful, but since there is no actual way to give punishment on them who create those scam project. For me i just let it go and tried to fine another project that should be better and it's an honest project.

I agree with you. finding them is not an easy thing to do. even most likely also all identities that they provide on the websites are not themselves and fooling with this on crypto is certainly easy to do.
actually, good research and analysis will be helpful in the selection of ICO and this I think is lost on investors. When it was hit by the scam, had da hope again and make it learning.

Identifying a genuine or fake project is certainly very difficult. And when I was hit by fraud, of course, it was a loss for me. But before I decided to join the ICO project I examined it from various aspects. And if the ICO project has a membership that can be contacted as an e-mail, I will definitely contact him.

 :-XActually, there are many aspects that we must know before joining ICO. This is of course to avoid various frauds. When I will join ICO, I have to know the company's background. When they display via video and other shows about their company, then I will trust it more.

I think ICO will not die because ICO is a way to introduce something new to the public and it's a way to attract an investor to invest in the project. I am sure that there still any good project that could survive and continue the project and they will not makes the investor disappointed with the project. This type of project will reach the success someday because they are careful with the project and of course, with the investor too. But I don't deny that right now, there are many ICO becoming a scam because the dev and the team only giving promises without any proves and say be patient.

What I did when I was fooled. Of course there is nothing we can do about this problem. Because of course this is actually not our will. Therefore, before investing, of course, you are sure and analyze in advance the project you want to invest there. So that nothing happens called fraud.

I have also been deceived. But here is the world of cryptocurrencies. No one will pay for your wrong investment. Although I lost a lot of dollars, I still believe in the future market of cryptocurrencies, so I will not give up support for cryptocurrencies.

The best way to protect us is to be careful and always be alert to all very sophisticated scam situations. You can only be limited but I think absolutely impossible. Your perception and vision along wth your senses are important to the success of the projects you participate in.

Post offended contributor. How many companies have you checked? This problem can be solved only by the platforms themselves, by implementing the function of returning funds.

I guess quit ahead and support other that is profitable. At the moment it is not that important to choose which is the best but its okay now to be joined in a real one because of the scams.

What I do if I find a scam project, I will comment on their social accounts, like Facebook or Twitter, I will write that this project is "SCAM" and if they have an application in the Playstore I will give one star and comment "SCAM" as I do on HOWDOO.

Right but not only in one but all around the world there are huge number of scammers who are ready to turn our profit into lose by scamming. It’s good to be careful before you invest because a little care can save our future. I have never been deceived but if I ever had to face it I will simply not repeat my mistake again and will investigate before investing in site.

It would be good if you started such a service, which is engaged in catching fraudsters, and not to do it yourself!

I hope that with the development of the blockchain, there will appear services that will be engaged in catching fraudsters.

Just be very diligent with your findings, that is all. The thing like you said is that fraudsters keep looking for new ways to keep upgrading with their deception, so in a way, the best thing is to make sure you are always a step ahead in most cases, and how can you do that? Just make sure you are basically not just looking at the surface, but checking out all the necessary things you need to know and as an investor, never be lazy to keep asking questions until you are fully convinced.

Do not stress yourself, as long as it is this market and for now there is no regulation in place, there is so little you can do in reporting fraudsters, and it is not like they will give you their identity in the first place. Most important thing is to ensure you have all the details of what you are investing in. Dig as deep as you can and don't fall for anything you are not sure about. I always keep saying as long as you know you are not sure of what you are investing in, then, do not invest.

At the moment, there is nothing that can be done once you are deceived and scammed ornphished

You can only learn from your pains and sufferings and garner more knowledge through that
Other than that
Am Afraid there is nothing else to be done

People creating scam projects should be brought to justice. They should get the appropriate penalties for doing such criminal acts. The problem is that many of these scam projects are using fake names with fake faces and fake credentials. The real culprit are behind the names that appear publicly. Of course there are also some real people who are also doing real scams. They should be imprisoned and fined. Actually, it is the role of the government agencies that nothing of this sort will prosper.

It would be quite difficult to track them if they're using fake identity which I'm sure they're if they're fake. Laws is not up to date on crypto related scams as far as I know. Best thing you can do is protect yourself and inform others about it so they can take precautions.

the advice you give is pretty good. especially now that there are many ico popping up. but, the problem is, for now I still haven't found the institution that regulates ico. so people are still fraudulent.

In principle, it is reasonable, only here is how to punish them if they are at such a distance, especially since we do not always know the identity of these people!

All of this still runs down to the fact that we have the best part to play so that we won't be deceived all the time. We can't stop fake people from operating their fake project but one can try not to fall their prey by doing thorough research about their various project.

For now there is nothing you can do, because the project was still unregulated. But if you are deceive, you can make a red flag for their btt username if you still know it, for you to warn other investors.

For the cryptocurrency market to be deceived, investors are usually helpless. There is no law in the cryptocurrency market and there is no regulation. So these conditions make the scammers find the ideal place. Deceivers can usually only sum up experience to avoid being cheated the next time.

It was not bad, but the fact is that fraudsters use other people's data, so it’s hard to find a real person to punish!

When we are lied to, there is not much we can do. As a merchant and bounty hunter, if fraud occurs I would be better to immediately look for another project. And for ICO search, then you must be careful and do research. And that will be my experience.

If you are deceived, then in no case do not despair and next time devote more time to research. And if you have any doubts about the project, turn your attention to another project. Try to personally communicate with the organizer. Truly legitimate and worthy projects, as a rule, are led by people who are open to constructive dialogue and do not hide their true intentions.

Unfortunately, today there is no real benefit from this, because today these are really huge problems in the future. Because deception is always transferred hard, but this is a wild west, in spite of the SEC, nothing happens, everything continues in the same mode.

It is unfortunate that many are trying to deceive other people for their personal gain. I think every investor should be careful and not easily be persuaded by attractive returns of these scammers. I think researching very about the project is still the best way to avoid being scammed.

Right. No sense in running after the bounty manager or developer since it's pointless. Best to just put it all under you, move on and be productive. That's the nature of bounties and before you sign up for a campaign you should already be aware of the risks. Better to move forward than to cry over spilled milk.

You should be strong to survive on this market. Just remember of some guys that have sold like 6000 BTC for 30 bucks and remember people that have hold these coins till 2017. Someone has become millionaire and someone has earned 30 bucks in 2010 :)

That will save you also from headache for running after them.
The OP has good intentions but the implementation is tough.
Dedicating yourself on calling or contacting them one after another would take so much time and effort.
And even if they are legit, still there's no guarantee that they will not scam people.
I've known projects with real members on board, but their main intention is to grab cash from those naive users.
So what I'm saying here is, you can always do your own research but just move on when it fails. You can post a scam allegation and post your proofs as one way of helping potential victims of the project.

So that you are not deceived, you need to study the market very well and have good knowledge of the processes taking place on it.
In the case of participation in campaigns, you need to carefully select the development team and make sure that these are real people.
Trust only yourself and respected market players.

I don't think trying to 'find and punish' the scammers will work. The best approach I think is to try to learn from our mistakes, understand why we fell victim to a scam, in order that we can improve the decisions that we make in future. Mistakes can be beneficial if they prevent bigger mistakes further down the line.

Unfortunately, this is so. It is necessary to make maximum efforts in order not to become a victim of deception. After you have been deceived, there is little that can be done.

So in short if we want to stay here for long term we will have to upgrade ourselves and we will have to keep our eyes open as there are so many people who are active all time just to deceive you and to get your money, so don’t trust any scamming site and make sure your money is in safe hands, get complete information about the site you are investing your money after that keep on looking about price rise and fall because safety of our investment is our own responsibility and it’s not a difficult task.

If that country has a law regulating crypto, then it may be useful. Then we can bring the team to justice. Your idea is very good.

It seems to me that it still will not help to punish scammers. Checking project contacts can be useful in order to simply determine their validity when you make an investment decision.

As I said earlier, in order to overcome fraud in the field of ICO, it is necessary to intervene at the legislative level, since without this nothing will happen.

The bad news is that there is not much you can do.
Blockchain tech is anonymous.
In almost all circumstances there is literally no way to get your money back because crypto is peer to peer.
They would have to willingly give it back, if they scammed you, of course they wouldn't just willingly give it back.

For legal issues, it is very complicated.
Each country can only enforce laws in their own country.
So if the scam was from russia, and you are british living in English, there is nothing you can do to pursue legal action.
Also, it gets more complicated because not every countries laws are the same.
It could be that in your country it is actually not illegal at all.

But, if you are lucky enough to be a citizen living in the country the scam was in, you could do something.
for example, if the scam was registered in America and you are american you can file with the SEC.

Lol. Your advice is okay. But this things you have suggested here are not practical and cannot give you a realistic view of the project. The scammers are very wise. They can design the website and put fake identities there and you will still fall for the scam. Best thing is to wait at exchanges.

That is the right thing to do, but the best way to answer for their action is they are compliant to the laws of the country where they are operating, and the best way to make sure that they areal people is for them to appear in a webinar and keep track of their achievements if they what they are saying are all true about their skills.

The best thing to do after being scammed or deceived in a cryptocurrency project or investment is to trace you steps back to understand how you fell prey to the scammers. The tactics used vary but you need to be as careful as possible.

I do not think that this devs are willing to give their true personal informations. If there main goal is to scam people, i surely doubt that they will just give misleading infos. However, we have to be vigilant and wise, DYOR before participating in any ICOs.

Sell ahead, don't let the time passed even more because the market of that crypto will just going to fall. I think you should be responsible enough to conduct a technical analysis first before you enter a market of any kind in order to secure your profit and avoid loses.

maybe before investing with crypto currencies we already know all the risks that will be obtained in investment and maybe what we have to understand with weaknesses in investment is there is no legal force that we can use for fraud, maybe if the legality already exists there are legal powers that can regulate it

The possibilities to give punishment to the people who makes those SCAM ico are still not possible, since all the anonymity, most of the project can't be find where the exact office of the project is, as long as there is no regulation for any new project.

I think this is a very effective method. This way we can get rid of the scammers and warn other investors and bounty hunters about them. But unfortunately, many blockchain startups simply do not collect the necessary amount for the ICO and close, such projects can not be called scams.

Even if you could contact them and talk to them that doesn't mean that they wouldn't scam you.
It is easy to make some fake information today so the best way for me is do your own research.
Most of the ICO nowadays doesn't look good and I think we already have so many crypto they just need to focus on improving.

many fraudsters have escaped their gross deeds, so that fraudsters are increasingly easy to deceive people, this is because the world of Crypto is not enforced by law, people sometimes with bigutu are easy to invest in the ICO which ultimately solves investors, the KYC process in my opinion I have not been strong enough to get to know the ICO makers, I hope that in the future there will be an ICO with a statement from the police of each country to avoid fraud.

I will just recommend you make research on them follow their topic diligently and see how the forum rate that person as most scammer get fished out thanks to the forum selected few member that ensure the safety of the community as active as they can I will just recommend you make research on them if you find anything wrong or out as the admin or member there

I have done so many bounty campaigns including the scammed ones also , only thing I have done is to be careful for the next time. I think this is the only option you have.

of course I will look for that person to force him to return the money they took from me by committing fraud. (if that is possible)  ;D

being deceived is a very annoying and embarrassing thing, it proves that we are not careful in trusting someone.

in online transactions it is very easy to do, because we only rely on remote trust even we do not know the real identity, residence and even the real company they built. therefore I suggest that we be more careful.

many people manipulate everything about their identity to be able to cheat and run away with the money we invest in their projects.

Be careful will be the only way we can do to avoid the scam projects but unfortunately, it is not easy to stay away from the scammers because of they always there and still searching the next target. We can avoid them by researching the project so we could as much information related to the project so it will help us to determine which project that potential to be a scam so we can stay away from them.

contact the relevant ico to get clarity about fraud. now there should be a legal entity tasked with managing fraud so that there is no ongoing fraud.

When I join this market, I often participate with the money I can lose so if I invest in a project, if it is a scam, I will lose money and that will be a lesson for me to choose a better project.

Even if you can contact the developer, there are so many probabilities on developer faking their address or they just buy a number to make the users trust the developer if they was real.

We've been deceived by people we know very well in real life. This is no difference when it comes to bounty huntimg. We all know that the trend now in crypto. The moment you decide to join a campaign, you be responsible for any out come. Its all risk taking. Some project may look trusted, but turn to be acting unusual when it comes to fulfilling their side of the deal.

Of course the chance that will help a very small , I think that next time you need to carefully study the project and its team , and of course I would not advise to send a lot of money now in the ico

I've never been cheated in cryptocurrency. In cryptocurrency you should always be on the check, and on suspicious sites it is better not to come in and give anybody the data from purses and accounts.

If it is just a simple investor, it is difficult to find out if the ICO project is a scam. If there is a regulatory intervention, I believe that the loss of investors will be reduced.

It is very difficult to report because in my own country bitcoin is still controversial and if the value is also not large the authorities will also be lazy when managing it because it must be very difficult to track

The possibility of succeeding in getting your funds back in my opinion is still small because indeed this scheme is difficult to be managed, especially if in your country there is still no attitude to support or not cryptocurrency, so it is better to be careful in investing

This is a risk and this is the reason why there are still many countries that limit the circulation of bitcoin. as long as bitcoin still does not get a regulation, it will make it difficult for this situation, bitcoin transactions cannot be legally protected and that is also the reason why the police do not respond, when there is a regulation it will have a different storyline. we all must continue to push for a way for the circulation of bitcoin that is legal and does not violate legally.

If you suspect project is scam, you can create a forum topic and discuss it with other bounty hunters, it is easier to catch the crooks.

Many forum topics on Bitcointalk is so childish. How old are you to begin with? 15years? Come on how many times do you allow yourself be deceived? When you are deceived,  learn from it and don't allow it happen again period

because that's the only thing that is best for us to do because anger or regret is useless.
we must be willing to learn from our experience so that we get better.
honestly, if there are many fraudsters in crypto, we must get used to and try our best so that we are not fooled.

I don't know the crypto currency law for sure. Moreover crypto currency is a cross-country and free business. The crypto currency market is a free market internationally so that the laws governing all cryptocurrency frauds have not been tightly restrained. However, if we know this fraud, we must act decisively and not let it. Indeed we have to make fraudulent articles that are distributed to all social media including linking to fraudulent sites so that more people will know about the fraud and not be the next victim.

It's only possible if you are living in the same region, but what if you are a hundred miles apart, you can get the identity of the people running behind the project, but if after they scammed you, there is no choice to run after them you will have to go to the developers country and file a case there, it will take a lot of money and time.

First of all you need to educate yourself from that deception. I mean, as humans we learn by experience and so getting deceived should add up to your list of lessons and then know what to do next time to prevent it.
And then your next option maybe to find out how authorities can get those deceivers punished (if any).

There is no way to avoid punishment. Eventually all those cheaters and robbers will be punished.As for me I was deceived multiple times, but I just keep going.
Crypto is tricky, you have to be prepared

This is a very frequent occurrence in cryptocurrencies and you should try to prevent this, of course it is said that it is very easy, but I think that you can write a statement to the police. Many projects today represent their team and this has already become the norm.

As long as the developers have not received your money, they will answer your questions in every way, be active in communicating with the community. They publish the latest news on Twitter and other social networks. However, as soon as their ICO ends, they disappear with your money. Invest better when ICO is over and tokens are placed on exchanges.

Maybe there's not much I can do because whatever I do, our assets will still not return. This is a valuable lesson for me and maybe more careful in maintaining the digital assets that I have. I am very disappointed with this hacker because it annoys me.

I do not believe that ICOs would die because of increasing amount of fraud projects. Just look at IEOs this is a new stage of holding a token sale, but you are right we need to find a way of how to protect people from taking part in scam projects.

Calling them on phone wouldn't make any sense. You're calling a scammer on phone and what do you expect them to tell you, to reveal to you that they are scammers? Lol, they wouldn't do that.

I think the best thing is just for you to work on your research and know what is right and wrong and you should also discuss whatever project you want to invest in the forum with people, and not just in the forum, you should also post it on Reddit and have experts look into and tell you whether you should go on with it or not. If they see anything suspicious, they'd probably tell you to give up on it.

The best decision is to try your best not to be deceived, because it's difficult to get back at scammers in this network.
Though certain actions can be taken, but mostly it doesn't yield anything, do a proper study of the project before giving them your money, so you wouldn't have to run around to retrieve it in the first place

Interesting ideas for checking projects, but I personally have not invested money at the ICO stage for a long time, participate in bounty campaigns and trade. I don't see any effective tools yet. Unless if before the ICO, the project should be ready for launch.

The best way to protect investors from fraudsters is to enter a third party into a transaction so that it receives money and issues them to developers only after a phased execution of work.
Right now they have come up with such an option as an IEO, where large exchanges have begun to appear as a third party, which guarantees that investors will not be deceived.

All the suggestions or opinions of the people here are very good for me and need to be tried because if you just say it without doing it, it doesn't seem serious. To defeat the deceiver we must unite to create a group and continue to find a good solution. Honest is not an easy thing but this is for the sake of ICO's future to be safe.

A wise thing to be done which if you are already coming to a point where you have doubts and would want to verify something then asking out the community
isn't really a bad idea yet you can able to see peoples insights towards a certain project and with that you can make your own decisions towards on majorities inputs but
be careful because some of it would really be just shills or lies.

I guess it might be the best choice if you stay away. It is just more logical to continue with more reliable ones. This could be a new currency to be created by CEO of any successful project, or Binance's sales or...

Yeah, right. You should do a thorough research before investing. Even if you do not manage to bring fraudsters to justice, such a measure of caution will still not be superfluous.

I think there must be a regulation that defies the new ICO projects created by the developers, every ICO that will come out must be able to prove that they are really supportive of the project being made and there must be a check to make sure, if they are rejected it was easy to look for it and fell in punishment according to his actions which made many victims deceived.

Yes, it will be useful to check the validity of the location and identity of the team. However, even this will not save you from scams. Because there are times when the project simply could not achieve development and dies, because the team did not cope with it.

it is difficult to punish people who commit fraud because of the lack of legal guarantees from the government, making it difficult
to get people who commit fraud in crypto to be arrested and imprisoned
if crypto has been legalized by the state, surely there will be rules to protect crypto users

Yes it's true, because at this time Crypto has not been legalized in all countries, so Crypto is still vulnerable to fraud which leads to loss for users, so in Crypto we have to be very careful.

ICO for me won't die however scammers are increasing by time. There are many solutions to avoid scam project actually. some are from ourselves and others come from the event. Binance has built a great solution for people to invest in a trustable project by inventing launchpad. The more trust-worthy exchange to provide ICO launching service is the more we can avoid scam project. But, rmemeber that scammers are smarter day by day.

At the moment, it is almost impossible to find scammers and the police rarely take up such cases.
This method will not help everywhere, if the project is created by professional scammers, they will think through all the details and you will be deceived.

At the moment? It has been always almost impossible to find them especially anonymous scammers, some of them sometimes make mistake and reveal their information but mostly no one can do anything about it.
They make crypto looking like crap.

If you are deceived in the cryptocurrency market, it can mean in almost all cases that you have lost time and money.
No need to despair and stop working in the cryptocurrency market.
Failures should be seen as an invaluable experience that will help you become very successful in the cryptocurrency market in the future.

I don't think we can do anything about the crooks .There will always be people who want to get all your money and steal from you.Perhaps some serious regulators will help.In the meantime, all my investments are at great risk.It may be profit or may lose everything and no one will help me get the money back.

Most jurisdictions would punish scammers, but your hopes of recovering funds are ... well you better forget about it. The best thing you can do after being deceived is extracting the right lesson from the situation and never putting yourself in a similar situation.

It depends where you are and what options you have, but in a lot of the cases recovery of your funds will be hardly possible.

Yes, you forget about ICO. This form of attracting investment survives lately. Now the new trend is the holding of an IEO at major exchanges. There is at least a guarantee that you will not lose all your money.

The  CRYPTO space is an open platform, present, you are your own security,therefore to avoid being scam, ensure you do your own research before investing, avoid visiting unsecure site, regularly update you PC with an anti virus, Do not  log in your  private key to exchange  site from mails sent to you from unknown source. 

That would be very nice. The concept should be on board and should be used in case of any scam. Scammers have all this time done nothing but have hurt the confidence of the investors who were too passionate to invest in ICOs.

Like we have the legal way to question any agent in the market, same should be in case of ICOs. And the trend of ICOs is going down. I do not think if some one would love to put in their money here any more. There are so many other assets that could be explored.

In fact, it is very difficult to analyze the cryptocurrency project and its economic and technical characteristics. It takes a lot of time and certain skills.

You do not forget also the fact that the developers of new projects often deceive their investors and it would be fair if the developers published their data, such as the ID and place of residence.

In fact, you can not do so much. Rather, it is important for me to extract the maximum useful experience from such a situation. At one time I was deceived more than once but for small amounts, I was hurt and I was very worried, but later I realized that this was a good lesson that saved me a lot of money in the future.

If i getting deceived, i think im gonna review why that happened. In cryptocurrency, anonymity is one of the advantage.
When you want to transfer money using bank account, you need real name, but you don't need real name to transfer your crypto coin.
So, other peoples can deceive you without their identity revealed to you.

The most important thing is not to panic, it is panic that turns out to be a very big mistake, because scammers are not as simple as you think. I am sure that they are also doing this not for the first time, so I think that all this is still a meaningless matter.

ICO needs to be centralized. For developers to go through KYC and take responsibility for their actions.

It is actually a good idea, however, can it really help us to find out who behind the scammers?
Every person will feel sad, bad, and also mad because of being deceived.
But, they are scammers and they will not show their identity easily to the public.
We still haven't known how to open their cover behind scammers. Sometimes, we are also aware that have been deceived after we invested in their scam project and disappeared.
Actually, everybody will really punish them, but how can we do that? We cannot report them to the police because they are likely not really revealed.

Why the preference in investing in ICOs instead of trying to mine some coin? Maybe it was the false promise for quick profits? ::) These unpleasant situations happen because there are people thinking about quick and easy money. In relation to your de facto suggestion, it's necessary to increase the demands and explanations for setting up an ICO and charging results.

We really understand this fully when it comes to financing in cryptocurrency because that is the main objective of the system, to create anonymity but in the case of ICO, I think any anonymous project theme is automatically a fraud, if an ICO comes up with a project without full details of who the team behind the project is, it is not really worth waiting time on such project and we need to stop really participating in them.

I know some of we bounty hunter too are greedy, because they promise us one large amount of token that will end up amounting to nothing, we don’t bother verifying the project before promoting it which has to really stop.

Bounty has got to a stage where a lot of people have been discouraged from participating in them, except you able able to get good bounties through quality research. If you do not want to be over bothered, you can try to include trading into your activities in the crypto space.

All the scammy behavior by the teams has indeed led many bounty participants to the decision not to do bounties anymore. We can argue about the effectiveness of bounties, but not about whether or not a payment should be made.

firstly, bringing the details or the identity of the deceiver to the general public to further restrain him or her from apprehending loads of victim as he may just be at the door of the next person and asking for a more heavier amount of money, secondly is to consult the authorities in charge of the crime depending on what kind of crime it is.

Yeah, but in most cases, they were targetted by the authorities and keep searching them until they pay for their crimes. Funds may somehow get back to those who got scammed but most of the time this never happen. They just put the person in jail after being found guilty of their actions.

People who do experience about this should learn their lesson or else they never learn if they got scammed again.

It would be very good if the developers of each project conducted public communication sessions through YouTube while simultaneously answering user questions. It would be very interesting to see such affordable developers and this would increase the credibility of the projects.

the law is obtained maybe if the crypto currency is recognized by the state as a valid currency and can be used to serve a currency that has legal force in it

If you are deceived by some fake projects then you can start a thread here on this forum and seek advise or help from the community. this is an open forum where every one can share their thoughts or opinion and even their expertise especially on tracking those scammers.

Right because they can hide the funds or even if the police finds out a crypto address you still don't have the private keys to access it.

If I got deceive then I will research for that how did I get a deceive and i will  find out the solution for that as soon as possible and I will give advice to those investors who are investing and doing the work on this project.

it will help other users to not get the same fraud, but whatever you do will not be able to make your money back when it's deceived.
there is no control so no one can freeze cheater wallet or address, they will still get your money

This could be a good idea. If the sale is still in progress, informing the community about scamming may result in good. But, if the sale already finished, this will only cause red trust. Besides, it is also possible to send complaint mail to the SEC.

indeed today many ICOs are scamming and making people who follow the gift feel sad about the current ICO situation. because ICo is not promising at this time like the previous ICO developments. so here more and more ICO enthusiasts are diminishing. because they are worried when they get a scam project.

That's why use a lot of wallets will much better rather than make all of your portfolios become centralized in one wallet. There will be a lot of requirements and documents to get your money back again and this has happened with mtgox and any other hacked case exchange site.

but most people if they have been cheated they will not investigate and not track them so they give up and maybe they will not easily trust every project.
more and more fraud, so people have to be more careful because they are easily deceived, bad people are increasingly cunning.

resign, because we don't have the power to protest and ask for guarantees for the aoa that has been lost from us when we are deceived. I have been tricked into bounty for 8 months running and not being paid for reasons that are always made by the developer.

If you are going to invest a huge amount, it's necessary to do that, and it's much better to invest in a project that you can travel to their location, or with the same location as yours, it will involve a lot of money if you have to travel to a far country just to file charges to these people.

because here or crypto doesn't have the law yet, I think it's back to each of us. as much as possible in order to prevent yourself from avoiding fraud. and I also know, there is no standard for measuring between real or scam projects, but at least convince yourself before entering.

You cam pm the user but we know that a fraud will not going to entertain you since it is their intention to decieve you especially when it is all about money.

Now, I think it is better to post in the reputation section about the incident so that others may going to know about it and get aware of it. This should help one to get reference when doing transaction with that fraudster.

The best thing to do is to accept it and learn from it. We learn from our mistakes and make this one as an example.

If you really want something like that to happen in the first place cryptocurrency has to become real asset and more regulations have to be included in this market. Than you can start thinking about protecting people's money.

we can go to their company related to fraudsters ico but that is not possible, therefore we before investing in ico need detailed research, how maps work and team clarity. It is important to anticipate when we are cheated we can at least report their company to the law.

ICOs are very terrible when comes to scamming people nowadays. I think the only thing we should do when it comes to promoting bounties is we should be very careful to what we are promoting. Before you start promoting a bounty you should make sure to look at the company background and the team members one by one, down to bounty manager, is he legit or not and then make your final decision. 

You should learn from your mistakes and skip the page, because you need to be confident and always be able to not repeat the same mistakes again. Moreover, if you are patient enough, you will be rewarded as the market returns its positions.

The best thing you can do is look forward and keep in mind what happened to be better equipped for future situations that might seem to be similar.